Saul and Patsy (18 page)

“Why do you say that?” He waits for a moment, then adds an endearment.
“Honey?”
There is a slight charge of irony, a sourness, to this, of love drained out of the endearment and bitterness poured in.

“Because,” she says, “here’s this kid. He’s stupid. He’s mean to you. He writes you terrible, illiterate notes. He doesn’t like you. He knocks over your beehives. But he shows up here like a little thug with his handgun, and then you take him home. And then for months and months he hangs around our yard, staring at us like the boy outside the bakery window with his nose pressed against the glass. And finally he shoots himself for no particular reason except he’s got his hands on a firearm again. So all day yesterday we try to explain what there’s no explanation for. And there’s nobody on the planet who’ll grieve, Saul, except for you. So you try to do it. You really do make the effort. Credit where credit is due. For a worthless no-account illiterate ignorant anti-Semitic kid, you go the full charitable nine yards. The sadness, the remorse. That’s why. Only the last humanist would do that. Everybody else, really, Saul, I’m not kidding, would be glad to see him gone. Well, not glad, but, you know.”

“I don’t know about the anti-Semitism part,” Saul says. He stops what he is doing to rub his scalp. Mary Esther sits down abruptly, experimentally, on the floor. Patsy sits down next to the two of them. “He
was
human, Patsy, carbon-based just like ourselves, and he wasn’t an anti-Semite, because that was too complicated for him. He was here, and then he was here, and then he was here again and again and again full of that negative energy of his, and now he’s gone, but he’s
still
here, and the thing is, they don’t go away unless you grieve them.” After turning around, he runs his hands tenderly through her hair. “And even then sometimes they don’t. Oh, Patsy. You are so beautiful. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true.”

She smiles at his compliment as if he means it. He’s only saying it, however, because they didn’t make love and this is a reparation. “See, I don’t think that’s it,” she tells him, still smiling. “This is where grieving shades over into the morbid.”

“Morbid? Patsy,” he says, “all this happened
yesterday
. He killed himself yesterday morning. God forgive us, we had a party last night. Morbid goes on and on. Morbid is for years. He hasn’t even had twenty-four hours to be dead in. One day, is all I’m saying. Give me one day. He would have given us one day.” Saul stops. He does not know what he meant by his last sentence.

“Okay, right. But you’re treating him as if he was somebody, Saul. He wasn’t.”

“Oh, he wasn’t?”

“Nope. He wasn’t anybody much at all. It’s just sentimental to say he was somebody. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’ve been talking about
all this time
. Sentimentality.”

The word hangs in the air, radiating its contempt, Saul thinks, for himself. In order to protect himself, Saul thinks: The word despises me, but it got loose from Patsy, who could not have meant it.

After taking off her slippers, he begins to massage her feet. He has always had a thing for her feet, which are slender but strong. He addresses the Patsy he loves, not the Patsy who just used the word “sentimentality” against him. “Well, I think he was somebody. I don’t know what kind of somebody he was, and I don’t think anybody knew, but he was that, at least. On the list where it says ‘Somebody,’ Gordy Himmelman gets included.”

“Saul,” she says, leaning back and closing her eyes as he massages her, “wake up. We’re in contemporary times now. And the kids they’re making, Saul, I’m telling you, the kids they’ve got in the schools, they’re not somebody anymore.” Lowering her gaze, she gives him her perfectly reasonable smile and her voice-of-realism voice. Somebody around here, she thinks, has to save Saul from his errant compassion; it endangers their family.

“They’re not?”

“No, honey, they aren’t. I hate to say it, but it’s true. They’re facsimiles, these kids, American-made humanoids. All-American McHumans. Why d’you think they call them
zombies
? This is why the nations rage against us. This whole country has a robot-thing going with its kids. Jesus Christ, you’re being mushy. These kids aren’t
anybody
! If they were, they wouldn’t call you on the phone or come into the front yard and then shoot themselves for no purpose at all in the world.” She waits. “They’d have a reason.”

“Well, if he wasn’t anybody, Patsy, then it’s perfectly all right for him to kill himself.” He smiles winsomely, a counterattack smile to her previous smile.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she says, her voice going metallic.

“
And
. . . if he’s not human, it’s all right for someone
else
to kill him. If he’s nobody, then anybody can kill him, legally, you know? And all the nonhuman kids like him.”

“Saul, you’re deliberately misrepresenting me.”

“And if these kids aren’t human, then who is? Who gets a right to be human? The dopes? The droolers? The ones who slur their words and live under bridges with the bums and the trolls? The Gypsies? The Jews? The Arabs? The Mormons? Who gets to be human? Who gets to live? Show me the qualifications, Patsy, since you’re such a goddamn expert on what it is to be human.”

“All right, all right, all right,” she says, shrugging, horrified by his sudden rage. “I see your point. Okay, okay.”

“I’m going to take a nap,” he says, but he stays right where he is, unmoving. “I’m tired.”

At ten minutes past three o’clock in the afternoon, Saul is still in his pajamas. Patsy has never seen him stay in his pajamas all afternoon except when he . . . no, she has never seen it. Mary Esther is upstairs napping after having crawled all over her father, and Saul now has the parts of a broken cuckoo clock out on the floor. He pretends to repair the little bellows for the cuckoo’s call. Perhaps he is actually repairing it. Mostly he just wool-gathers over there. He has the Brahms Clarinet Quintet on the audio system, always a bad sign—incipient, dangerous, and highly contagious lyrical melancholia, melancholy warbling its autumnal song as if that were the only song there ever was or could be, and Saul, her husband, singing right along with it, every scarily beautiful phrase, music like a virus, infecting the listener with lethal sadness.

And now Patsy hears a car coming up the driveway, and the phone ringing simultaneously. The phone, that teething baby, has been ringing whenever she places the receiver back on the hook. One friend after another, including Harold the barber, offering consolation and help. Out front, the car has stopped. Rushing past the spider plant, Patsy quickly answers the phone, to a voice that says, “Hi, Mrs. Bernstein? Is your Jew husband there?” before she hangs up. Then, quickly, she approaches the door, where Gordy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, has carried a large box from her car’s trunk and dropped it on the front stoop.

“Ms. Bagley,” Patsy says, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun.

“Well, hi there,” Gordy’s aunt says, tipping her head in what seems at first to be an ironic bow. But the bow isn’t ironic; shyness or anxiety or sheer confusion propel it. Her face, pockmarked and roughened, has a cigarette with a long ash apparently growing out of the side of the mouth. Brenda Bagley projects, in all directions, an energetic look of savage desperation.

She puts her hand, now with the cigarette, to her forehead while she clears her throat, and the hot coal tip comes dangerously close to her hairline. The ash falls gracefully to the stoop. Patsy watches it fall.

“I had to come over here. I’ve felt so bad, and I expect you have, too. Last night I couldn’t sleep, of course. Poor worthless kid, how I miss him. You ever miss a poor worthless kid? I tried calling first but the lines were all busy. So I thought I’d just get in the car and drive past.” She has tried to give her hair a few new curls, as if she knows she will be in the public eye. People will be judging her appearance. Her misapplied drugstore lipstick adds to the general overdetermined effect. She looks like a witch in a fairy tale with a poisoned candy house. Behind the house are frogs in a pen. Seeing Brenda Bagley’s efforts to beautify herself, Patsy has to force back—what
are
these?—yes: tears. The pathos of Brenda’s unattractiveness gives the woman an insidious power. Against her, Patsy feels all her defenses fading.
Ah,
Patsy thinks,
here is a real expert in unhappiness. Here is the
tenured full professor of suffering.

Patsy asks her if she’d like to come in. Please, Patsy adds. Gordy’s aunt shakes her head, exhaling smoke as if her heart were a furnace. “No, I couldn’t do that to you. Not invited, like I am. What awful times,” she says. “I’m just so broken up, I don’t know what to do with myself. Like I say, I’m not company for you or anyone. What I thought was, I should come over here with a gift, this gift box of his things that I gathered from his closet this morning. It’s what I thought of last night, when I couldn’t sleep.”

“A box?”

“Right. I thought you and your husband would want some of the boy’s clothing, your husband being Gordy’s teacher and all, and considering what happened over here. Gordy had his feelings about you both. He just couldn’t stay away. Never did tell me why.” Something about her facial expression does not match what she is saying; her glance has become shrewd and inquisitorial, almost gleefully full of hatred. She is a woman who knows how to exploit her unattractiveness and unhappiness. She has all the considerable resources of the weak: the rags, the incompetence when dealing with catastrophe, the unendurable face, the incorrect tone, the addictions, the cluelessness, the echoing footsteps out of the ravaged town.

For a moment what Gordy’s aunt has said does not register on Patsy at all. Then it does. “What feelings were those? And you mean to say,” pointing at the box, “those are Gordy’s
clothes
?”

“Not all the clothes he owned. Just some of them. That’s what I’m telling you,” Brenda says, repeating her confusing ironic bow, a failed gesture of respect, followed by a long inhale. Brenda’s eyes are watering now, and the grief no longer seems to be feigned, though perhaps the tears simply follow the irritating effect of the smoke. Patsy wonders what her grief is based on, if that’s what it is, and where she gets it from. How does a person mourn someone like Gordy Himmelman? Out of what tenderness could it possibly arise? You don’t tear your hair and beat your breast after the demise of a kid like that. Do you? Some questions she does not dare to ask.

And now Saul in his pajamas appears behind Patsy, carrying the cuckoo clock bellows in his left hand. He squeezes it, and a cuckoo’s call rises from his fingers. Life, Patsy thinks, is more dreamlike than any dream. “You’re in your pajamas,” Brenda says. “You sick?”

“Yes,” Saul says without interest. “I am. You?”

“No, not me, not yet. Okay, I’ll stay away from you. Right here is my distance. Well, like I was saying to your wife there, those’re some of his clothes.” She points down to the box, before she pulls up the top flap and reaches in. “A few of his shirts, and a couple pair of pants, and socks. I would like for you to have them.” She lifts up a pair of blue jeans for display. Ash from her cigarette falls on them. “A remembrance gift.” Dark stains decorate the jeans where the ash has not touched them.

“We can’t take them,” Saul says. “They’re Gordy’s.”

“Not anymore, they ain’t. Sure, you can take them. He was right about your size.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m certainly not taking them back,” she says with sudden coldness. “You can do with them what you want, you and your wife, give them away to Goodwill if that’s what you’d like to do, use them as rags. Don’t even have to bring them into the house if you don’t want to, leave ’em out here.
I just can’t keep them around,
” she barks out, almost as a scream. “But,” she then says, taking a deep breath as if to compose herself, “now that’s taken care of, there’s another thing I was having to ask you about, on a related matter. I haven’t seen the boy’s father in a couple years. Maybe you know. I tried him in Wyoming and then in Colorado. They never heard of him in either place. I’ve tried everywhere. Police have, too. Vanished from the face of the earth, Rufus has. God, that man was a pure worthless piece of worthlessness. Oh, well. There’s the matter of the expense related to the cremation, and now I’ve got to take care of that by myself as the next of kin.” She peers around Patsy toward Saul, in his pajamas. “And I just can’t.”

“I think I understand,” Saul says. “You want some financial help.” Patsy feels herself physically leaving this scene. She is not going to be here. Let Saul take care of it, she thinks, the money. Let him be the Last American Humanist. Let him exercise his compassion. That’s his sideline. He’s good at that. But she is not going to let him spend their money, including the portion that she herself has earned. Not here. Not now.

“Not in so many words,” Gordy’s aunt says, putting the soiled blue jeans back into the box, after carefully folding them. “What I’m asking is
whether
you can help out. A contribution. It’s not like we can start a community-wide fund for him. People don’t care for a suicide. That’s not a cause they empty their pockets for.”

“How much?” Saul asks, glancing at Patsy, who seems to be gazing off at the horizon, having somehow managed strategically to space out. She doesn’t seem to be here anymore. No help from her, the professional loan officer. Not a dime for the dead boy’s tribute.

“Whatever you can spare,” Brenda half-whispers. “For the cremation. Or the box?”

“All right,” he whispers back, in sympathy. “You take a check?”

“Whatever you can spare,” Brenda repeats, her eyes filling with tears. “For that poor boy.”

“Make sure it’s your checkbook, honey,” Patsy says, awakening. “Not the joint one.”

“Whatever you can spare. For that poor boy,” Patsy imitates late that night, in the living room. She needs to be callous. A bit of insensitivity allows her to breathe. She feels, and has for most of the afternoon, as if she had been fitted with a whalebone corset. She needs the relief of standoffishness from the harms that pity leaves on her spirit. “Good god, what a performance. And this is—”