Saul and Patsy (8 page)

On the morning when Mary Esther was celebrating her birthday—she was four weeks old—they sat at the breakfast table with the sun, in a rare appearance, blazing in through the east window and reflecting off the butter knife. With one hand, Patsy fed herself corn flakes. With the other hand she held Mary Esther, who was nursing. Patsy was also glancing down at the morning paper on the table and was talking to Saul about his upcoming birthday, what color shirt to get him. She chewed her corn flakes thoughtfully and only reacted when Mary Esther sucked too hard. It hurt, and it showed on Patsy’s face. A deep brown, she said. You’d look good in that. It’d show off your eyes.

Listening, Saul watched them both, rattled by the domestic sensuality of their pairing, and his spirit shook with wild, bruised, jealous love. He felt pointless and redundant, a citizen of the tiny principality of irony. His heart, that trapped bird, flapped in its cage. Patsy’s breast belonged to him, he thought, not to Mary Esther, even though she could make better use of it than he could. He was ashamed of being jealous of his baby daughter, and he squirmed in his chair as he finished his oatmeal. Actually, he realized, Patsy’s breast belonged to Patsy. Behind Patsy the kitchen spice rack displayed its orderly contents. Everything in the house was orderly, thanks to Patsy, everything except Saul. A delivery truck rumbled by on Whitefeather Road. He felt specifically his shallow and approximate condition. In broad daylight, night enfolded him.

He went off to work feeling superfluous and ecstatic and horny, his body glowing with its fatherly confusions.

That semester, Saul had been pulled from one section of American history and had been reassigned to remedial English for learning-disabled students in the high school. “Anyone can teach English,” his principal, Zoltan Kabelá
, liked to say. “It’s our mother tongue.” Zoltan, speaking for the school, had claimed that the economic times being what they were, the district could not afford a full-time specialist in remedial education, and because Saul had been a persistent advocate of the rights of the learning-disabled at school meetings and elsewhere, and because, he suspected, Zoltan Kabelá
did not like him, he had been assigned a group of seven kids in remedial writing, and they all met in a converted storage room at the back of the school at eight-thirty, following the second bell.

Five of them were pleasant and sweet-tempered and bewildered (by life, by Saul, by most of what happened to them day after day, the confusing pageant of getting dressed, taking the bus, and telling time), but two of them appeared to hate the class and, very convincingly, Saul himself, their hatred occasionally focused to a fine point on him. They sat, these two, as far away from him as possible, near the back wall close to the brooms, whispering to each other and smiling with energetic young-adolescent malevolence at him. Saul had tried everything with them— jokes, praise, discipline—but nothing had worked to increase the boys’ interest in reading or to lower their scorn for education, and he had arrived at a state of strong, steady uneasiness, a feeling that soon they would try to enact some awfulness upon him, a terrible dangerous prank. He could feel it coming.

He thought of the two boys, Gordy Himmelman and Bob Pawlak, as the Child Cossacks. They belonged in Central Asia somewhere. However, interesting hatred could arise anywhere. Gordy apparently had no parents, just an aunt. His mother had died in a house fire, and his father had gone west and stayed there and had gradually disappeared. No one knew where he was; he had not been heard from in years. Gordy lived with his aunt in a manufactured home on the north side of town. Marly Albertson, the school social worker assigned to Gordy, said the situation out there at Brenda Bagley’s house—Brenda Bagley was Gordy’s aunt— was like a museum of creepiness and warned him not to ask about it if he didn’t want to know. Saul had met Brenda once. She had an unattractiveness so painful to look upon that you felt guilty of rubbernecking if you glanced at her twice. When she came in for a conference, her facial complexion looked scaly, and she sat down with the slow elaborate courtesy of working people out of their element in a classroom, the unease of the uninvited. She gave the appearance of knowing that she was not wanted anywhere she happened to be. She had said almost nothing for the fifteen minutes during which Saul described Gordy’s failings. She appeared to be broken down by hard work—she was a waitress at the Fleetwood— and she nodded dumbly at everything Saul told her, as if his desolate words were no more than what she had expected, wounds on top of wounds.

Saul had driven by Gordy’s home a couple of times and had seen a desperate barking dog chained to a stake in the front yard. Often Gordy came to school wearing a T-shirt spotted with blood. His boots were scuffed from objects he had kicked or that had simply fallen haplessly into his path. On his face were two rashes, one from acne, the other from blankness. Girls avoided him. His eyes, on those occasions when they met Saul’s, were cold and lunar. If you were dying on the side of the road in a rainstorm, Saul thought, Gordy’s eyes would pass over you and continue on, after you died, to the next interesting sight.

Sometimes Gordy would begin to stare at Saul at the beginning of class and not stop until the class was finally over. The contours of Gordy’s fixation were unknowable, Saul had decided.

Politically and socially and ideologically, Saul had once felt pity and compassion and generosity toward the wretched of the earth. He still did, when he considered them as a class, and only when they appeared as individuals did they sometimes alarm him. He suspected that Gordy hated him in a final, visceral manner, above or below argument.

Gordy’s friend Bob Pawlak was a dog-killer and a cat-killer, he claimed. He shot them with his 410, he said. Perhaps it was just talk. In a moment of intimacy he had bragged to Saul about killing cats, and his laughter, describing how he went about it, was not quite under control. His smile was the meanest one Saul had ever seen on an ex-child, a smile also visible on the face of Bob’s father, Bob Pawlak, Sr., who once came in, unbelievably, for a parent conference. About his boy, Bob Sr. agreed that Bob Jr. was a hell-raiser, but, then, so was he. He shook his dismayed and proud parental head, decorated with gin blossoms.

Saul could hardly stand to look at Gordy and Bob. But Gordy was not afraid to look at Saul. As was his habit, he stared and stared. There were no windows in the room where he taught them, and no fan, and after half an hour of everyone’s mingled breathing, the air in the room was foul enough to kill a canary.

Earlier in the week Saul had given the kids pictures clipped from magazines. They were supposed to write one-sentence stories to accompany each picture. For these high schoolers, the task would be a challenge. Now, before school started, his mind still on Patsy and Mary Esther, Saul began to read yesterday’s sentences. Gordy and Bob had as usual not written anything. Gordy had torn his picture to bits, and Bob had shredded and eaten his. But the other students had made their brave attempts.

It is dangerous to dive into a pool of water without the nolige of the depth
because if it is salow you could hit your head that might creat unconsheness and
drowding.

Quite serprisingly the boy finds among the presents rapings which are now
discarded a model air plan.

Two sentences, each one requiring ten minutes’ work. Saul stared at them, word by word, feeling himself stumbling in a cognitive limp. What was the next lesson? Where did one start? The sentences were like glimpses into the shattered mind of God.

Like the hourse a cow is an animal and the human race feasts on its meat and
diary which form the bulky hornd animal.

The cold blooded crecher the bird will lay an egg and in a piriod of time a
new bird will brake out of it as a storm of burth.

Saul looked up from his desk at the sputtering overhead lights and the grimy acoustic tile. It was in the storm of birth—mouths of babes, etc.— that he himself was currently being tossed.

He looked down at the floor again and spotted a piece of paper with the words “your a kick” close to the wastebasket. Finally, a nice compliment! He tossed it away.

Saul’s mother had been visiting. When Saul arrived at home, carrying the
Five Oaks News-Chronicle,
Delia met him at the door and gave him a kiss on the cheek, leaving lipstick and perfume on him, like a claim check. She had more scents than a cougar. This was the fourth day of a projected six-day visit. She had been cooking meals, helping out with the housework, and taking care of Mary Esther whenever Patsy flagged or needed to nap. Delia did not like the name “Mary Esther” and much preferred “Emmy.” Whenever his mother called her grandchild “Emmy,” Saul felt himself getting slowly but steadily irritated at his mother’s assumption that he and Patsy were disqualified from naming their own daughter themselves, that they would do it incorrectly.

The house, which had once smelled of Saul and Patsy, and the sweet-sour loamy smells of parenting and babyhood, now smelled pungently of Delia’s perfume, a fragrance with the power of an air-raid siren. What was the point? Why did a new grandmother have to wear so much perfume? Well, Saul thought, the question answers itself. His mother had given birth to him when she was twenty-one. She was now in her forties, and still, she thought, a player.

Delia was tall, with brilliant red hair, and restless. Bracelets rang noisily on her wrists, and she favored large clumpy necklaces of amber. She had long elegant fingers tipped with brilliant blood-red nail polish. She had a dominatrix side, he thought uncharitably. Saul, who liked Richard Strauss’s operas and once played trombone in one of the Northwestern University student pit orchestras, sometimes referred to his mother as “the Marschallin” and thought that Eleanor Steber could do a good job of playing her. Moving around the house like a woman who meant business no matter what she was doing, she had missed her calling, Saul claimed in bed to Patsy. She should have been a full-time aristocrat running a palace, planning masked balls, arranging other people’s affairs. She aspired to a certain level of domesticated depravity. Just watching her tired him out and gave him headaches. Always tanned and fit, she had a personal trainer at a health club in Bethesda, and Saul was always dismayed by how good-looking his mother was, how disconcertingly sexy. No middle-aged woman needed to be that beautiful, he thought, especially when the beauty is fading just enough to give it warmth, and that woman is your mother, and your father has died young, and your mother has gone on to have a succession of boyfriends, and . . . and . . .

His mother took his hand. He wondered if he had a streak of misogyny. Probably only in regard to his mother. Other women did not inspire it.

“Emmy was a little angel today,” the Marschallin said, nodding toward the living room, where Mary Esther was sleeping in Patsy’s arms. Patsy raised her face toward Saul. “How was work?” his mother asked, keeping her voice down. “How was school?”

The question made him feel like a child. Delia had that effect on him. Saul removed his hand from his mother’s and pursed his lips in Patsy’s direction. He took out a handkerchief to wipe off his mother’s lipstick from his face. But he could feel its imprint there, worming its way through the skin toward his brain. “Work was fine. Someone left me a note. They said I was a kick.”

“That’s nice,” Delia said dubiously. “A kick? In what sense?”

“In the sense that . . . oh, you know. A party.
That’s a real kick.
Fun.”

Very quietly, from her chair, Patsy said, “Nobody uses that word that way anymore.” Having gathered her blond hair back in a ponytail, she gazed down at Mary Esther and touched the baby’s own perfect feathery hair. Patsy’s beauty was fuller and more human, Saul thought, than his mother’s. It was actionable. You wanted to mate with her. His wife’s beauty made him happy and crazy, and his mother’s beauty just made him crazy, period. Maybe menopause would calm his mother down, but he doubted it.