Saul and Patsy (16 page)

“No. Not exactly. He had written those illegible notes of his. He once called me a shitbird.”

Traci McMahoney moved the microphone away from her mouth. Quietly, confidentially, she said to Saul, “We can’t put words like that on the air.”

“I know,” Saul said. “I was just telling you what he said.” His eyebrow itched. He scratched it. “I thought I had just better tell the truth.”

“Okay,” she said, still conspiratorially,
sotto voce.
Then, resuming her professional voice, she said, “Had he seemed depressed to you?”

“Depressed? No. That wasn’t like him. At least I don’t think so.”

“What about these notes you mentioned?”

“Oh, the notes? He wrote notes in class about how much he didn’t like school. He once called me a kike, but he didn’t really mean it. I don’t even know where he found that word.”

Traci McMahoney shifted her weight on her great legs, expressing impatience and dissatisfaction. She gave off a scent of some wonderful perfume redolent of the Elysian Fields. It made Saul think of Tahiti, where he had never been. Patsy never wore perfume; she had allergies. Brenda’s perfume, by contrast, smelled like the perfume counter in a drugstore. Saul intuited that the interview was not going well, however, and that the fault was probably his. He would try to do better. He wanted to please Traci McMahoney.

“What were you doing when it happened?” she asked.

“I was standing in front of the bedroom window,” Saul said, “listening to my wife tell me about my mother’s affair with the yard boy.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Traci McMahoney said. She dropped the microphone again. “Can we start over? Let’s start over. You don’t need to go into details like that. It’s distracting to the viewers. Let’s start over. And let’s try to stay on-message. This’ll be the second take. This is all on tape anyway. We’ll do some editing. Thank
God
this isn’t an on-the-air breaking-news report.”

Once again she did an introduction. Today, she said,
The Uplands has
been a scene of tragedy,
in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman. Boy, man. Which was he? This time they ran through the same questions one after the other, but Saul remembered not to mention his mother and not to say anything about shitbirds or kikes.

“Had he threatened anyone else?” she asked.

“Gordy? No. Well, I don’t think so.”

“Do you know where he got the gun?”

“From his aunt, I think. I believe she had hidden it, and he found it.”

“Wouldn’t you consider this a tragedy?”

“Sort of,” Saul said.

“Could you expand on that?”

“Well, I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did. He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them, mindlessly. I don’t know if you could call that a tragedy or not. It just happened. It was . . .” Saul struggled to find an adjective. “It was
tidal.
”

“Wouldn’t you say it’s a tragedy
every
time a young life is snuffed out?”

“Probably,” Saul said. “Depends on what you mean by ‘tragedy.’” Traci McMahoney frowned again. “If you mean a story of a great man brought low by circumstances related to his character, resulting in events that cause a purging of pity and fear, then no.”

Her frown was growing permanent. “So what you’re saying is, this is another meaningless tragedy, uh, story of violence among our young people.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s
meaningless,
” Saul told her. “It’s rare for something to be meaningless.”

“Would you care to expand on that?”

“It’s not meaningless if there are guns everywhere. If a weird unhappy kid can get a gun anytime he wants one, then it’s not meaningless. It means that there are too many guns around.”

Traci McMahoney smiled. “Too many guns?”

“This whole country is gun crazy,” Saul said. “From the president on down.”

“Well, you can save that for the Editorial Moment,” Traci McMahoney said, grimacing. “On Sunday night just before sign-off. What about Gordon Himmelman?”

“What about him?”

“Do you feel that you failed him somehow? That the system failed him?”

“Failed him? Me? Who knows? But I doubt it.”

“I mean, do you think you could have stopped him?”

“How?”

“Counseling. More one-on-one. Aggressive intervention. Mentoring.”

“Boys like Gordy Himmelman don’t usually take to counseling. Besides, I wasn’t his parent. He
did
have this air of abandonment, I’ll say that. He was like the creature set loose by Dr. Frankenstein.” It had come right out of his mouth. He didn’t mean to say it, but he had said it anyway. “You ignore them and they turn into monsters.”

“A monster? No, I won’t follow that up. I could, but I won’t. Is there a chance that this wasn’t a suicide? Could it have been an accident? Why did he come over to your house with a loaded gun?”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Saul said. “He had the gun barrel pointed inside his mouth. Maybe he wanted to impress us.”

There was a long beat during which Traci McMahoney tried to think of a question. “So, in conclusion, why do you think he did it? Do you have an explanation for this terrible trage—,uh, event?”

“Yeah. Too many guns, too much television, not enough reading, a crazy violence-prone culture, and a kid, I mean an
okay
kid with lousy parenting, probably, or nonparenting, and he needed cognitive help, so you get this dumb bloodfest, this Americana suicide, right? I mean, is there really a big enigma? I don’t see a big enigma here. Maybe the only big enigma is that he didn’t wait to go charging into the school lunch-room next fall spraying bullets. Small favors, and all that. You’ve got to be careful not to sentimentalize when something like this happens.”

“You feel strongly about this,” Traci McMahoney said, in disbelief.

“Yes. I don’t like sentimentality,” Saul said.

“Okay.” She lowered the microphone and nodded at the videocam guy, doing a quick gesture in front of her eyes and a nod indicating a cut. The cameraman lowered the videocam away from his eye before hoisting it backward onto his shoulder, and Saul could see that he was smirking. Then Traci McMahoney turned to Saul once again. “Well,
that
was mostly unusable. Look,” she said, brilliantly smiling, “I agree with you about a lot of what you said, but you can’t say those things on-camera. That’s editorial-page. That’s not front-page. We’re doing front-page. This is a lead story. You
do
see the difference.”

“Right.”

“We’re gonna have to do a lot of editing on that. Sorry. You’re kind of a walking outtake.”

“Okay. I was just trying to avoid the usual pieties.”

“The usual pieties. Well, you succeeded. Let me make sure I have this right. You’re Saul Bernstein.” She wrote his name down in a tiny notebook. She licked her lips.

“Yes.”

“Pronounced ‘steen’ or ‘stine’?”

“For TV I don’t care.
‘Steen,’
usually.”

“All right.” She looked up at him, smelling of Tahiti, where he would never go. “You’re very weird.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize. Really. I apologize to you, profusely. Did I say that? Actually, no, in some sense, I
didn’t
say that. We’re agreed? All right? I didn’t say that.”

“All right,” Saul said.

“Thank you for your interesting comments.” She turned away. “Where’s the aunt?” she asked. “Is the aunt free, yet?” The cameraman pointed toward Saul and Patsy’s front door, where Brenda was waiting for them to interview her. She had a hand mirror out and was hopelessly fixing her seaweed hair. Everybody was working on the hair today. “Let’s go,” Traci McMahoney said, striding away. “Maybe we can get an aunt segment.”

Saul looked up into the sky as Patsy approached him. He recognized what he was doing as one of Gordy’s habits, staring up into the sky as if something of interest were located there. The day was extremely bright, still beautiful, perhaps, though the sun had disappeared, and no clouds were visible. The sky was like a heat radiator full of steam. “How did I do?” he asked her. Mary Esther was fussy and complaining in Patsy’s arms, and Saul could tell from a pissy odor that her diaper needed changing. She handed Emmy to Saul.

“How did you do?” Patsy leaned back. Saul noticed immediately how much more human she was than Traci McMahoney. Less sexy but more human and more beautiful. Her integrity. Her love for him. Look at her eyes! There was genuine feeling there! “How did you
do
?” Now she leaned forward. “Honey. Listen to me. A boy killed himself in our yard this morning, and now, at eight minutes before five o’clock, you’re asking me how you did? I should hit you. Or something. I don’t mean for that woman and the way that you . . .”

She couldn’t finish the sentence, because at that moment, which was also a future moment, and a past one as well—time had become indelibly confused somehow—Saul felt himself hit or nudged. Looking up at the upstairs window of his house, he saw (and didn’t see) himself, and Patsy, the two of them naked there, with Mary Esther in Patsy’s arms. He—the Saul of the here and now—was standing where Gordy had been, on the spot where the boy had stood. He did not break out into sobs. No, he wasn’t even crying; no cathartic moment presented itself. After all, it had been a small death, and it was not, in any sense, a tragedy, as he had carefully noted. But it was still a death. And something precious to Saul—he couldn’t even say what it was, and he prided himself on his occasional sensitivities—something precious to him felt, what was the word,
trashed.
And for that, and maybe even for Gordy Himmelman with a bullet hole at the back of his skull and his blood on the tree in the yard, his body carted away under a sheet, for all those things . . . what
was
the word, those things
unloved,
a boy who in a single moment hadn’t wanted to live anymore, Saul felt suddenly like an accomplice, even though the expression on his face did not change, and Patsy leaned forward toward him, making an arc over their crying daughter, in common grief.

Ten

After the officers of the law had returned with their notebooks and clipboards to their patrol cars, and after the Action News vans had sped away to the next news site, and after the two reporters from the
Five Oaks
News-Chronicle
had departed, taking the young staff photographer with the shaved head with them, and after the superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, had called to schedule what he called a “strategy session” with Saul for the following week, maybe Tuesday, Saul and Patsy sat in their living room, wondering what would hit them next. They had taken the phone off the hook. Mary Esther toyed with her Busy Box in the playpen, and when she stood and whined (she could stand on her own now and would soon be in the toddler stage; her first words had already been said), Saul took her up to her bedroom. Patsy could hear him singing to her.

Patsy didn’t want to be alone with Saul for the rest of the evening. She dreaded that prospect.

Hurriedly, she called Harold, Saul’s friend, who said he would be over in a matter of minutes, with his wife, Agatha. After putting the phone down and consulting her address book, Patsy called her friend from the bank, in the loan office, Susan. She and Susan were both loan officers in different branches in town. Susan said yes, of course, she would drop everything. She said she didn’t think she could bring her husband, Wyatt. Wyatt was working on the city budget. Then Patsy called Mad Dog Bettermine and the woman he lived with, Karla, and after they agreed to come, she invited another friend, Julie Dusenberg, an instructor in English at Holbein College whom Saul and Patsy had met at a day-care center in town. Julie was a single mom, and she said she’d be over in a jiffy as long as it was okay with them if she brought her daughter, Kate, with her, and as long as it was okay if she didn’t stay until late. Patsy then called Laurie Welsh. Laurie couldn’t come because of the kids—Hugh was gone, Laurie didn’t say where, though Patsy guessed he was probably out drinking—but asked if there was anything else she could do. She had already heard about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. She wanted to
be there
for her.
Before Patsy could say anything, Laurie said she’d bring some cooked chicken by tomorrow, would she be around at ten in the morning?

Still in a nervous rush, Patsy called two high school teachers, the Krolls, Rosanne and Hank. She called Gary Krochock, their funny and embittered divorced single neighbor and insurance agent. They all said that they would drop by. Then, like someone who has been on a binge, she stopped herself.

By the time Saul came back down the stairs, five of their friends were already sitting in the living room, waiting for him, and Patsy knew, just from the look on his face, that he understood why she had invited them, and understood why they were there.

Saul went into the kitchen to bring in the beer, but several of the guests had brought their own and had already opened theirs. When he came back out, the death party, such as it was, had ground to a standstill; an expressive air pocket of dead silence greeted him.

Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was oddly muted, mumbling. It’s a desert in here, Patsy thought, as Saul handed out more beer to his friends. Gordy Himmelman had died storyless. Mad Dog and Karla and Saul had all taught him, but he had drifted invisibly, sullenly, into their classrooms and out again. Harold, the barber, had cut the boy’s hair and had known Gordy’s mother, once upon a time, but he had no stories about her son. No, he hadn’t been a good athlete; no, he didn’t have a good sense of humor; and, no, he wasn’t especially kind or considerate. The one really memorable action he had performed in his life, the one thing that everybody would remember about him and say about him as long as they remembered him or talked about him was that he had shot himself.

Saul and Patsy told the story of how they had stood before the window when it had happened. They told the story of the reporter from Channel Seven, Traci McMahoney.

Julie Dusenberg, the English instructor, hoisting her sleepy daughter, Kate, to her left breast, said it was like a case study. The whole event was like a case study.

“A case study of what?” Hank Kroll asked.

“I don’t know,” Julie Dusenberg said dispiritedly. “A case study of something. Of our time,” she said, finally, in desperation, “that you could
deconstruct
.”

“Well, it’s already deconstructed,” Gary Krochock said, from where he was stretched out on the floor. He was wearing a University of Oklahoma sweatshirt and was balancing his beer bottle on his stomach. “If it’s in the morgue, it’s completely deconstructed, if you want my opinion. It doesn’t get more deconstructed than that. By the way, did you know that ‘disarticulation’ is a medical term? It means taking the body apart, limb by limb.”

“Don’t tell me that this is going to turn into a discussion of American youth,” Mad Dog said, from his end of the sofa, peering with one eye into his empty beer bottle, “because if this turns into a discussion of American youth, I’m going home right now, no questions asked.” He gave off a slight air of pre-drunkenness. “I don’t want to hear about any of that.”

“But the boy’s
dead,
” Karla said to him. Karla, Saul noted, was the sexiest woman he had ever known who was not beautiful. She looked like a minor player in a porno movie. “Can’t anyone say anything good about him?”

“No,” Mad Dog said. “And I
knew
him.” He sat there. “Wait a minute. I thought of something. He made good paper airplanes.”

“But he’s a human
soul,
” Karla said, slapping him on the arm. “Where’s your charity?”

“Where it belongs,” Mad Dog said. “With you. With us.”

“Poor kid, anyway,” someone half-whispered. “Poor old kid, anyway.”

Susan Palmer all at once spoke up. “I don’t see why we have to feel bad. Patsy? You shouldn’t be feeling all guilty and everything. He wasn’t a charming orphan. He didn’t have asthma. He didn’t run away and then come home again, reformed like the prodigal whatever. He wrote semi-illiterate threatening notes, threatening our
friends,
and let’s face it, he was a big stinking mess. He destroyed Saul’s beehives, when you lived over there. It’s lucky he didn’t hurt Mary Esther. He came into their front yard and waved a gun around, and he sort of harassed them, and I agree, it’s a trauma, but I don’t see what obligation we have to be sentimental about some little
shit
.” She waited. “I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away.”

A long silence followed, interrupted by the sounds of beer pouring into mouths. Mad Dog suppressed a belch. Someone—Patsy thought maybe it was Rosanne, who almost never spoke—said, “So what you’re saying is, good riddance.”

“Did I say that?” Susan Palmer asked. “No. I don’t believe I said that.”

Another air pocket of silence opened up. Finally, the insurance agent, Gary Krochock, said, “I’ve got to tell you guys about this dream I had last night. Since we’re talking about the dead and everything. It was extremely weird. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”

“You did what?” Saul asked.

“I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat. We were in this big room, maybe it was a recording studio, which I don’t know much about because I’ve never been in one, but I
know
there were microphones, and Sinatra is out of the room, but he’s left his hat upside down on the floor. And because I had to take a pee, I pissed into it. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”

“What did he say?”

“Frank? He didn’t say anything. He was out of the room. But I got scared, and I woke up,” Gary Krochock said. He was still stretched out on the floor. “I’m in big trouble now. I’m in a world of trouble.”

“Frank Sinatra is dead,” Patsy said. “You’re beyond harm.”

“No, but see, that’s the difference. The Chairman of the Board is powerful even in death. That’s why I’m telling you this. He has
not
lost his influence. He has friends here
and
there. He’s going to be very, very angry that I pissed into his hat. I don’t feel that I’m safe anymore. Frank Sinatra—well, there’s someone you don’t want to have for an enemy, especially in the afterlife.”

“Take out a policy on yourself,” Mad Dog suggested.

“Too late,” the insurance agent said. “Preexisting condition.”

“What time is it?” Julie Dusenberg asked. “I probably have to go.”

“Two minutes before eleven,” Patsy said without looking at her watch.

“Turn on the news,” Agatha, Harold’s wife, said. “Saul’ll be on.”

Harold reached down for the remote on the coffee table in front of him, pressed a button, and the TV sprang to appliance-life with a miscellany of hisses and crackles.

“Channel Seven,” Saul said.

They watched an ad for Bruckner Buick, some sort of midsummer clearance sale on sedans and SUVs. Then they waited through an ad for a local house-and-garden store until at last the news, preceded by a brass fanfare, came on, with the tease headline, “Local boy dies in schoolteacher’s front yard.” Dennis Peterson, the local anchor for Channel Seven, appeared behind the news desk, his toupee a fraction of an inch off-center, and he gazed solemnly at the lens, the way he always did when he had a major story to report. “A shocking event in Five Oaks today,” he began, in his baritone voice.

“He has a big ole head,” Gary Krochock said, of Dennis Peterson. “He looks like a goddamn pedophile.”

“Why can’t they use complete sentences?” Saul asked. “Not even Tom Brokaw uses complete sentences anymore.”

Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was watching the screen, Patsy noticed. Dennis Peterson continued. “A seventeen-year-old Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman, died by his own hand this morning with a single gunshot to the head. The handgun used in the suicide belonged to the victim’s aunt, and the young man had stolen it from her. The death occurred on Whitefeather Road, in the front yard of Five Oaks high school teacher Saul Bernstein. We do not yet know why the boy had bicycled to his teacher’s house to end his life, and there are still conflicting theories and many unanswered questions about this shocking event. We have a full report by Traci McMahoney.”

“I
used
to teach in the high school,” Saul said quickly. “I don’t know what I do now.”

“You should be making a tape of this,” Harold muttered to Patsy. “You may need it.”

“You think so?” Patsy asked.

“That’s right, Denny,” Traci McMahoney said. She was also seated at the news desk in the studio. Patsy noticed that she was wearing a different outfit from the one she was wearing earlier this afternoon. “Tonight,” she said, “we have many more questions than answers about the tragic death of Five Oaks high schooler Gordon Himmelman.”

There was a cut to an establishing shot of Saul and Patsy’s brand-new house on Whitefeather Road, at The Uplands. Traci McMahoney’s commentary continued in a voice-over as the screen presented more shots of the house, the lawn, and finally the tree, viewed from a back-angle so that the bloodstains didn’t show. “The scene of the death was this quiet front yard in a residential area near the Wolverine Outlet Mall. The young man, Gordon Himmelman, lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. He was a troubled student, challenged academically in high school, currently a dropout, and a former member of the Cub Scouts. His mother had died several years ago in a house fire, and the boy, according to those who knew him, was known for his sense of humor and his pranks.”

“What? Cub Scouts?” Saul asked the TV.
“Pranks?”

“The boy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, filled us in on some details.”

“Where’s Saul?” Gary Krochock asked from the floor. “I want to see Saul.”

The screen cut to a close-up of Gordy’s aunt. She was smiling but the smile was stoic and unconvincing. “My nephew was a wonderful boy,” she said. “Just wonderful. He didn’t have a care in the world. He could get into scrapes, okay, but this is what he
was,
and what he
wasn’t,
well, I don’t know, because this thing doesn’t make any sense, this tragedy that he
did,
to himself, with the gun he found that I had hidden, there’s two and two. I can’t put it together, two and two that just don’t add up. It’s still just two and two.”

“Boy, is she ugly,” Gary Krochock said. “A
poltroon
. She looks like someone slid into her face at second base. With cleats on.”

“That’s an awful thing to say,” Julie Dusenberg said, turning around to look. “She’s just scared.”

“And what of Gordon Himmelman’s teacher?” Traci McMahoney asked, on a voice-over again, with a medium shot on the tape of Saul looking perplexed, standing next to Patsy. “Saul Bern
steen
? When we asked him for some reaction, he seemed as baffled as the victim’s aunt.”

“Hey,” Saul said. “I wasn’t baffled.”

Suddenly there was a close-up of Saul. People in Saul and Patsy’s living room started to clap. The others shushed them. “I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did,” Saul said onscreen into the microphone. “He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them.”

The camera cut back to Traci McMahoney, and then to a shot of Garfield-Fraser Middle School, where the principal was being interviewed about school violence. “Where’s the rest of me?” Saul cried.

“The police have searched for a suicide note but have so far turned up nothing to give them any insight to this terrible event,” Traci McMahoney said. “So far, we have no clues as to why the armed boy bicycled over to his teacher’s house, and we have no clues, either, concerning the motivations for his tragic suicide. The only person who had the answers to these questions cannot give us one. In an age of violence in our schools, there may in fact be no easy explanations. Those who are left grieving must still wonder over the causes tonight. Perhaps the only blessing is that this happened during the summer, during school vacation, so that Gordon Himmelman’s school friends can have time before classes begin to mourn his loss. Reporting from Whitefeather Road, this is Traci McMahoney.”

“That was totally insane,” Harold said, shaking his head and looking away from the TV screen. “Jesus. That thing about summer vacation. What the fuck was
that
about?”