The Corrections: A Novel (65 page)

“Tell the people at Axon,” she told Denise, “that Dad has some mild symptoms of hallucination which his doctor says are
probably drug-related
. Then, see, if Corecktall helps him, we can take him off the medication, and the hallucinations will probably stop.”

She told not only her friends but everybody else she knew in St. Jude, including her butcher, her broker, and her mailman, that her grandson Jonah was coming for the holidays. Naturally she was disappointed that Gary and Jonah were staying for just three days and were leaving at noon on Christmas, but plenty of fun could be packed into three days. She had tickets for the Christmasland light show and
The
Nutcracker
, tree-trimming, sledding, caroling, and a Christmas Eve church service were also on the bill. She dug out cookie recipes that she hadn’t used in twenty years. She laid in eggnog.

On the Sunday before Christmas she awoke at 3:05 a.m. and thought:
Thirty-six hours
. Four hours later she got up thinking:
Thirty-two hours
. Late in the day she took Alfred to the street-association Christmas party at Dale and Honey Driblett’s, sat him down safely with Kirby Root, and proceeded to remind all her neighbors that her favorite grandson, who’d been
looking forward all year
to a Christmas in St. Jude, was arriving tomorrow afternoon. She located Alfred in the Dribletts’ downstairs bathroom and argued with him unexpectedly about his supposed constipation. She took him home and put him to bed, erased the argument from her memory, and sat down in the dining room to knock off another dozen Christmas cards.

Already the wicker basket for incoming greetings contained a four-inch stack of cards from old friends like Norma Greene and new friends like Sylvia Roth. More and more
senders Xeroxed or word-processed their Christmas notes, but Enid was having none of this. Even if it meant being late with them, she’d undertaken to handwrite a hundred notes and hand-address nearly two hundred envelopes. Besides her standard Two-Paragraph Note and her four-paragraph Full Note, she had a boilerplate Short Note:

It was ten o’clock and she was shaking the cramp from her writing hand when Gary called from Philadelphia.

“Looking forward to seeing the two of you in seventeen hours!” Enid sang into the telephone.

“Some bad news here,” Gary said. “Jonah’s been throwing up and has a fever. I don’t think I can take him on the plane.”

This camel of disappointment balked at the needle’s eye of Enid’s willingness to apprehend it.

“See how he feels in the morning,” she said. “Kids get twenty-four-hour bugs, I bet he’ll be fine. He can rest on the plane if he needs to. He can go to bed early and sleep late on Tuesday!”

“Mother.”

“If he’s really sick, Gary, I understand, he can’t come. But if he gets over his fever—”

“Believe me, we’re all disappointed. Especially Jonah.”

“No need to make any decision right this minute. Tomorrow is a completely new day.”

“I’m warning you it will probably just be me.”

“Well, but, Gary, things could look very, very different in the morning. Why don’t you wait and make your decision then, and surprise me. I bet everything’s going to work out fine!”

It was the season of joy and miracles, and Enid went to bed full of hope.

Early the next morning she was awakened—
rewarded
—by the ringing of the phone, the sound of Chip’s voice, the news that he was coming home from Lithuania within forty-eight hours and the family would be complete on Christmas Eve. She was humming when she went downstairs and pinned another ornament on the Advent calendar that hung on the front door.

For as long as anyone could remember, the Tuesday ladies’ group at the church had raised money by manufacturing Advent calendars. These calendars were not, as Enid would hasten to tell you, the cheap windowed cardboard items that you bought for five dollars in a cellophane sleeve. They were beautifully hand-sewn and reusable. A green felt Christmas tree was stitched to a square of bleached canvas with twelve numbered pockets across the top and another twelve across the bottom. On each morning of Advent your children took an ornament from a pocket—a tiny rocking horse of felt and sequins, or a yellow felt turtledove, or a sequin-encrusted toy soldier—and pinned it to the tree. Even now, with her children all grown, Enid continued to shuffle and distribute the ornaments in their pockets every November 30. Only the ornament in the twenty-fourth pocket was the same every year: a tiny plastic Christ child in a walnut shell spray-painted gold. Although Enid generally fell far short of fervor in her Christian beliefs, she was devout about this ornament. To her
it was an icon not merely of the Lord but of her own three babies and of all the sweet baby-smelling babies of the world. She’d filled the twenty-fourth pocket for thirty years, she knew very well what it contained, and still the anticipation of opening it could take her breath away.

“It’s wonderful news about Chip, don’t you think?” she asked Alfred at breakfast.

Alfred was shoveling up his hamster-pellet All-Bran and drinking his morning drink of hot milk and water. His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

“
Chip
will be here
tomorrow
,” Enid repeated. “Isn’t that wonderful news? Aren’t you happy?”

Alfred consulted with the soggy mass of All-Bran on his wandering spoon. “Well,” he said. “If he comes.”

“He said he’d be here tomorrow afternoon,” Enid said. “Maybe, if he’s not too tired, he can go to
The Nutcracker
with us. I still have six tickets.”

“I am dubious,” Alfred said.

That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.

Enid had pinned her hopes, like a baby in a walnut shell, on Corecktall. If Alfred proved to be too confused to participate in the testing, she didn’t know what she was going to do. Her life therefore bore a strange resemblance to the lives of those friends of hers, Chuck Meisner and Joe Person in particular, who were “addicted” to monitoring their investments. According to Bea, Chuck’s anxiety drove him to check quotes on his computer two or three times an hour, and the last time Enid and Alfred had gone out with the Persons, Joe had made Enid
frantic
by cell-phoning three different brokers from the restaurant. But she was the same way with Alfred: painfully attuned to every hopeful upswing, forever fearful of a crash.

Her freest hour of the day came after breakfast. Every morning, as soon as Alfred had downed his cup of hot milky water, he went to the basement and focused on evacuation. Enid wasn’t welcome to speak to him during this peak hour of his anxiety, but she could leave him to his own devices. His colonic preoccupations were a madness but not the kind of madness that would disqualify him for Corecktall.

Outside the kitchen window, snowflakes from an eerily blue-clouded sky drifted through the twigs of an unthriving dogwood that had been planted (this really dated it) by Chuck Meisner. Enid mixed and refrigerated a ham loaf for later baking and assembled a salad of bananas, green grapes, canned pineapple, marshmallows, and lemon Jell-O. These foods, along with twice-baked potatoes, were official St. Jude favorites of Jonah’s and were on the menu for tonight.

For months she’d imagined Jonah pinning the Christ child to the Advent calendar on the morning of the twenty-fourth.

Elated by her second cup of coffee, she went upstairs and knelt by the old cherrywood dresser of Gary’s where she kept gifts and party favors. She’d finished her Christmas shopping weeks ago, but all she’d bought for Chip was a sale-priced brown-and-red Pendleton wool bathrobe. Chip had forfeited her goodwill several Christmases ago by sending her a used-looking cookbook,
Foods of Morocco
, wrapped in aluminum foil and decorated with stick-on pictures of coat hangers with red slashes through them. Now that he was coming home from Lithuania, however, she wanted to reward him to the full extent of her gift budget. Which was: 

Having paid $55 for the bathrobe, she needed $45 worth of additional gifts for Chip. She rummaged in the dresser drawers. She rejected the vases in shopworn boxes from Hong Kong, the many matching bridge decks and score pads, the many thematic cocktail napkins, the really neat and really useless pen-and-pencil sets, the many travel alarm clocks that folded up or beeped in unusual ways, the shoehorn with a telescoping handle, the inexplicably dull Korean steak knives, the cork-bottomed bronze coasters with locomotives engraved on their faces, the ceramic 5×7 picture frame with the word “Memories” in glazed lavender script, the onyx turtle figurines from Mexico, and the cleverly boxed kit of ribbon and wrapping paper called The Gift of Giving. She weighed the suitability of the pewter candle snuffer and the Lucite saltshaker cum pepper grinder. Recalling the paucity of Chip’s home furnishings, she decided that the snuffer and the shaker/grinder would do just fine.

In the season of joy and miracles, while she wrapped, she forgot about the urine-smelling laboratory and its noxious crickets. She was able not to care that Alfred had put up the Christmas tree at a twenty-degree tilt. She could believe that Jonah was feeling just as healthy this morning as she was.

By the time she’d finished her wrapping, the light in the gull-plumage winter sky had a midday angle and intensity. She went down to the basement, where she found the Ping-Pong table buried under green strings of lights, like a chassis engulfed by kudzu, and Alfred seated on the floor with electrician’s tape, pliers, and extension cords.

“Damn these lights!” he said.

“Al, what are you doing on the floor?”

“These goddamned cheap new lights!”

“Don’t
worry
about them. Just leave them. Let Gary and Jonah do that. Come upstairs and have lunch.”

The flight from Philadelphia was due in at one-thirty. Gary was going to rent a car and be at the house by three,
and Enid intended to let Alfred sleep in the meantime, because tonight she would have reinforcements. Tonight, if he got up and wandered, she wouldn’t be the only one on duty.

The quiet in the house after lunch was of such density that it nearly stopped the clocks. These final hours of waiting ought to have been the perfect time to write some Christmas cards, a win-win occasion in which either the minutes would fly by or she would get a lot of work done; but time could not be cheated in this way. Beginning a Short Note, she felt as if she were pushing her pen through molasses. She lost track of her words, wrote
took an unexpected “swim” in an
unexpected “swim,”
and had to throw the card away. She stood up to check the kitchen clock and found that five minutes had passed since she’d last checked. She arranged an assortment of cookies on a lacquered wooden holiday plate. She set a knife and a huge pear on a cutting board. She shook a carton of eggnog. She loaded the coffeemaker in case Gary wanted coffee. She sat down to write a Short Note and saw in the blank whiteness of the card a reflection of her mind. She went to the window and peered out at the bleached zoysia lawn. The mailman, struggling with holiday volumes, was coming up the walk with a mighty bundle that he pushed through the slot in three batches. She pounced on the mail and sorted wheat from chaff, but she was too distracted to open the cards. She went down to the blue chair in the basement.

“Al,” she shouted, “I think you should get up.”

He sat up haystack-haired and empty-eyed. “Are they here?”

“Any minute. Maybe you want to freshen up.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Gary and Jonah, unless Jonah’s too sick.”

“Gary,” Alfred said. “And Jonah.”

“Why don’t you take a
shower
?”

He shook his head. “No showers.”

“If you want to be stuck in that tub when they get here—”

“I think I’m entitled to a bath, after the work I’ve done.”

There was a nice shower stall in the downstairs bathroom, but Alfred had never liked to stand while bathing. Since Enid now refused to help him get out of the upstairs tub, he sometimes sat there for an hour, the water cold and soap-gray at his haunches, before he contrived to extricate himself, because he was so stubborn.

He had bathwater running in the upstairs bathroom when the long-awaited knock finally came.

Enid rushed to the front door and opened it to the vision of her handsome elder son alone on the front stoop. He was wearing his calfskin jacket and holding a carry-on suitcase and a paper shopping bag. Sunlight, low and polarized, had found a way around the clouds, as it often did near the end of a winter day. Flooding the street was the preposterous golden indoor light with which a minor painter might illuminate the parting of the Red Sea. The bricks of the Persons’ house, the blue and purple winter clouds, and the dark green resinous shrubs were all so falsely vivid as to be not even pretty but alien, foreboding.

“Where’s Jonah?” Enid cried.

Gary came inside and set his bags down. “He still has a fever.”

Enid accepted a kiss. Needing a moment to collect herself, she told Gary to bring his other suitcase in while he was at it.

“This is my only suitcase,” he informed her in a courtroom kind of voice.

She stared at the tiny bag. “That’s all you brought?”

“Look, I know you’re disappointed about Jonah—”