Saul and Patsy (19 page)

“They’re not even going to have a funeral, Patsy. They just need a box or something to bury Gordy in. That’s all.”

“Listen to me.” They’re both sitting on the floor, surrounded by a heap of soiled Gordy-clothing. There are clothes for warm and cold seasons. Flannel shirts, underwear, socks, jeans, corduroys—a mess of dirty stinking fraying fabrics. During the summer the boy had carried with him an odor of hay and old cheese. As the weather turned colder, his aromas mutated and became furry. The December-and-January Gordy had given off the scent of the dogs he probably slept with, and here were the clothes from those months, smelling as if they had come straight from the Humane Society.

She has raised her hand to his shoulder. It rests there a moment and then rises to his face. “You’re not guilty of anything, sweetie.
You did nothing wrong.
And what happened yesterday here was shocking, and we have every right to be shocked. . . .”

“Oh, do you think so?” Saul asks. “I think that adults aren’t shocked. They pretend to be shocked, but they aren’t, not really. It’s a pose.”

“You weren’t shocked? What would it have taken yesterday to shock you?”

“Something else. I wasn’t
shocked,
” Saul insists, running his hands through the pockets of Gordy Himmelman’s trousers. “What were we expecting all those months, anyway? That he would eventually go away? We had gotten accustomed to him. No, yesterday I felt something else.”

“Okay.”

He searches her face before speaking. “Oh, I felt surprise, maybe, but that’s different. Here’s a dopey kid whose aunt has a gun and who stands and stands in our front yard without ever telling us what he wanted from us. And, by the way, why were
you
shocked? You’re the person who worked up the conviction that he was not like us, a nonhuman. That’s the height of sophistication, if you ask me, calling him a nonperson. That was really worldly of you. That was positively European.”

“Okay, Saul,” Patsy says. “Before we have a real fight, let me ask you a question. Between grief and indifference, what is there? There isn’t anything. Show me the typical half-sob and maybe I’ll sort of believe you.”

“Actually, it’s called sadness, Patsy. In English, that’s the word they have available between grief and indifference. And someday I’ll show you a half-sob. Just not now.” He puts his hands inside another pair of the boy’s pockets and removes some small torn bits of paper. “Hey, Patsy, you just don’t feel it. Modest grief is not there for
you
. You’re more a creature of black and white. What’s this?”

The papers are nested, one inside the other, like puzzle parts. They seem to have been sections of a larger sheet of paper that has been ripped inexpertly. Saul puts them down on the floor in an attempt to reassemble them, five small pieces that together form a blue-lined page of school notebook paper, three punched holes on the left side. Outdoors, the wind starts up, and the lights flicker, but only for a moment. The papers tremble on the floor. They appear to be animated by the breathing of the world soul. Something is scrawled on them, and Saul bends down to make out the phrases, Gordy’s modest scrawled leavings.

She did it
they toad the car
mad in america!!!!

“I taught him to write, so he could write this,” Saul says. “I taught him language, so he could curse. I wonder what this ‘she did it’ business is all about.” He turns the papers over and reassembles them. On the reverse side there are only four words.

no fear
exxxtrabila
tyemeszeemer

“Oh, right. No fear.” Saul shrugs. “And ‘exxxtrabila’—where d’you suppose he learned that word?”

The now-working cuckoo clock ticks from the wall. Patsy looks at the paper. “From the other polyglots, that’s who. He watched a lot of TV. No real clues here, though,” she says. “The kid didn’t have a lick of sense.”

“You know what I think?” Saul asks. His face takes on an animated stare. “I think the aunt was abusing him. That Brenda Bagley woman. That’s what ‘she did it’ means. She was abusing him. So he shot himself. Mystery solved.”

“Come
on,
Saul. Let’s not do the abuse narrative.” Just then, the phone rings. It is the twentieth call of the day, probably another kind friend offering help. Saul gets up to answer it.

“Hi,” the voice says. “It’s Gordy. How’re you doin’?” The voice does not sound at all like Gordy but like a grown man imitating a boy.

“Just fine, Gordy,” Saul replies. “And how’re you?”

“You’re lying,” the voice says. “You’re not fine at all.”

“This isn’t Gordy. Who am I talking to? Who is this?”

“Yes, it is. I just learned
German
. They teach all the dead buggers
German.
It’s the universal language back here. You have to learn
German
in the afterlife. Didn’t you know that? You can learn it here in a few hours.” The voice laughs, with its bizarre inflections. “It’s real easy learning
German
when you’re dead because it’s like a mind-thing that happens. It’s like
boom,
and then you speak it. See, German solved all my problems.” The speaker is laughing heartily. “You’ll learn it, too, when you’re dead. Which could be any time now.”

Ah, Saul thinks, a militia guy, a trailer-park fascist.

“You know,” Saul says, “it’s late, my man, and I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I think I’ll hang up on you now.”

“Don’t you hang up on me, you fucking Jew. With that boy’s blood on your dirty Jew hands, you—”

“Wow,” Saul says, putting the receiver down. “Wow, wow, wow.” He stands for a moment, trying to find some object on which to rest his gaze. At last he sees Patsy and studies her. His hand is trembling with anger. “Maybe,” he says, “we should get a gun ourselves.”

“Shocked?” Patsy asks, gazing back at him.

Late that night Patsy discovers that she is alone in bed. When her legs sweep across the sheeted mattress, nothing meets them but cotton and air. Where is Saul this time? An unpleasant, ill-meaning summer wind blows against the house, causing the bedsheet to ruffle and the Chapstick to roll off Saul’s dresser. On the wall, the photograph of Patsy’s parents trembles in time to the rattles of the windowframes. Nothing in this house seems to be built solidly, to be able to withstand the onrushes of fate and wind, except Patsy. Saul has a tendency to be blown over, wherever he is. Where
is
he?

Walking down the hall past Mary Esther’s room, she finds him hunched over in the spare bedroom. He is bent over his desk. Grit touches the bottoms of Patsy’s bare feet. When she glances down, she sees that he is reading some story or other by Mishima.

“Come to bed, Saul,” Patsy orders him. “Come to bed, my love.”

She takes his hand with one of her hands and clicks off the desk lamp with the other. She draws him back to the bedroom. “No, wait a minute,” she says. “Brush your teeth first. I want to make love to you after you’ve brushed your teeth. I like your mouth when it tastes of toothpaste.”

Saul shuffles into the bathroom, and Patsy follows him, standing behind him with her head on his back as he raises the toothpaste tube, unscrews the cap, and covers the toothbrush with the candied goo, the morning-taste of it. She rubs the flat of her hands over his chest, one of her predictably effective arousal techniques, time-tested. Then she lowers her hand into his pajamas and takes hold of him, a familiar gesture, almost by rote, this preparatory ritual, their cure for the rest of the world. As he brushes his teeth, she feels him slowly becoming hard. The taming of passion into married ceremony has a sweet-and-sour taste for her, passion made manageable and harmless and almost comic, the forest fire reduced to the size of a Franklin stove. Whatever the great passions might be, they are not exemplified by married couples, who have nothing but their day-long familiarities and private languages and their ordinary love to bind them together. The wind outside continues to rattle the windowframes, and now the telephone is ringing again, senselessly. With Patsy’s hand still holding on to him, Saul rinses his mouth out, puts the toothbrush away, and carefully screws the cap back onto the toothpaste tube. Then he turns around and kisses her, a kiss full of desperate friendliness and unsurprise, same old tongue, same old teeth. Saul is willfully half-smiling as he kisses Patsy. It is as if she has caught him in an affair, and now something about themselves as a couple has to be proved, or proved again.

She can almost always make him forget himself and remember her. She has been naked for him so often by now that nakedness has nearly lost its original meaning between the two of them. Sure enough, his mouth tastes of toothpaste. Sure enough, his mouth fits on hers in the usual way. The taste, on top of the Saul-taste, is amusingly discordant, like a bear that has been taught to ride a bicycle and use mouthwash, but the domesticity of it energizes her because he has tamed himself for her. He has renounced being someone else for being her husband, and that renunciation makes up for his anger and his sentimentality. So in addition to her usual nakedness, she will be more naked to him than usual, a disavowal to the indifference they both felt for each other this morning and which (she has kept this secret from him) has shadowed her all day like a bad, unforgettable, and prophetic dream of the death of love between them. This dreadful, sickly, mean-spirited day, one of the worst of her life—it has to be forgotten, it has to be purged.

She struggles tonight to demonstrate more desire than she actually feels just to cleanse the air, but in that struggle she achieves some measure of the craving she has not had access to for weeks. Pretending to have a missing emotion, sometimes you actually get it. A good actor can evoke the nonexistent. She wills herself to open herself to Saul in ways that feel new to her, and through the fog of his preoccupations, at last he notices: good God, what is she doing? Is she really doing that? Saul, for his part, can’t quite believe how slithery and inviting and emotionally naked she is making herself. She is working a purgation, first on herself, and then on him, snaking her way over him and under him, doing a feverish humming thing for him until, as the windows continue to rattle from the stage-managed wind, at last they both come together within a few seconds of each other, and a minute or so later, still looking at the ceiling, Saul thinks:
Maybe we should get a dog, you know, we could use a dog,
and Patsy thinks:
That was it, that time, I’m going to be pregnant again, a boy, I just know it.

Twelve

Gordy hadn’t been suicidal. Still, he had committed suicide. The logic of this confounded everybody.

The superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, called a meeting of faculty and concerned parents and family members one week after Gordy’s death. The meeting was held in the high school auditorium on a Tuesday night. The season being summer, the hallways smelled of floor cleanser, and no one seemed to know how to get all the proper lights directed to the podium on the stage—Harry Bell, the custodial engineer, was on a fishing trip up north—with the result that Superintendent Vermilya, a pumpkin-faced overweight man with a buzzcut and slit-lens reading glasses perched at the tip of his nose, stood speaking to everyone in semidarkness, as did the psychiatric social worker who had been hired to consult and to give advice about the grieving process. The lights were shining on the rear of the auditorium stage, but the superintendent and the social worker by necessity stood in the front, and the effect was that of a poorly rehearsed show. They were probably kind people who meant well. The problem was, Saul thought, there was no grieving because the grief had no source or origin, as grief must. They were disposing of a boy whom nobody liked, who had already disposed of himself. Good intentions didn’t mean much in a struggle with emptiness.

Patsy, carrying Mary Esther, estimated the crowd at about seventy, but no one except Saul seemed particularly sorrow-stricken, and Saul’s mournfulness was freakish; it was not clearly understood by anyone, including Saul. Everyone else had shown up out of curiosity or dutiful-ness. Gordy Himmelman hadn’t made much of an impression on any of his other teachers, Saul discovered, and when he had, the impressions were unfavorable. He had drifted, unloved and unsought, down the birth canal out of the womb, and then, in school, he had drifted from kindergarten onward and upward to the more challenging grades, where he had made his mark by a more accelerated drift toward failure, the boy being mostly friendless and frictionless, slipping and sliding toward his own death, and hostile to those who wanted to help him. Then he destroyed himself, and here, now, were the undestroyed, convening to talk.

After stepping up to the ill-lighted podium, the superintendent said that he had spoken to both of the Bernsteins, Saul and his wonderful wife, Patsy, who had witnessed this terrible event, and he had spoken to Gordy Himmelman’s guardian and next of kin, his aunt, Brenda Bagley, who had owned the gun in question. The sheriff’s office had investigated, and the medical examiner was doing an autopsy to check for a possible drug or alcohol component and to rule out any other possible contributing medical causes. Gordy’s behavior
had
been observed to be erratic. The boy had been a behavioral problem, certainly, with a learning disability, but he was not particularly exceptional in this regard. So far no one, it appeared, was to blame. Besides, he was a dropout from school. “It was extremely fortunate,” the superintendent said, underlining certain phrases by lowering his voice an octave, “that no one else was hurt.” Then he stifled a yawn.

The collective judgment was that Gordy Himmelman had taken a tragic interest in guns. He had never been properly trained in their use. He played with guns to give himself a feeling of power—to compensate for his poor work at school and for his social failures. The suicide had certain aspects of an accident. Like other troubled youths, especially impulsive young men, Gordy Himmelman had, tragically—his voice once again dropped an octave—
taken the easy way out
. A life had been snuffed, like a candle’s flame, but after the inquiries so far it appeared to have been nobody’s fault, the superintendent had repeated. “Mistakes were made,” he said, “but we cannot say who made them. Let’s say that we all made them
.
And let’s go on from there. We can’t dwell forever in the past. The past,” he said, “is a canceled check. We expect never to have another incident like this in Five Oaks. Therefore, we have invited Jane Henderson to help us out.”

The psychiatric social worker, Jane Henderson, who had been brought in from Holbein College, carried her coffee cup to the podium. She was a brisk and efficient woman in her late thirties. Saul thought she had the hardened professionalism of a business consultant: the glaring half-smile, the chignon, the pitiless rules of thumb, the overenunciated words combined with common sense set out in formulated phrases. She assured the audience that teen suicides were terrible tragedies and, furthermore, that they were now epidemic. Terrible as Gordy’s death was, however, it was important to recognize that it had been one of many such suicides all across the United States, each one of them tragically preventable. Saul noticed that the word “tragic” was cropping up repeatedly, compulsively, though no one really meant it or felt it. “I am sorry to report to you,” she said, “that your community is only the latest to have suffered from this terrible plague. What can we do? We
can
do something. We can empower ourselves. We can watch for signs of trouble.” She then listed, using a PowerPoint demonstration, the ten warning signs of a tragically troubled teen—including clothing signs, verbal signs, gestural signs, the closed doors, the sullenness, the touchiness in response to questions. Gordy had exhibited four and one-half of these signs. He could have been spotted and helped out; at the very least, he could have been given counseling and, perhaps, medication.

“You have to be alert,” Jane Henderson said. “These events can precipitate into a contagion in a community like ours.”

Saul sat with his head in his hands. You couldn’t answer human disorder like Gordy’s with PowerPoint demonstrations. He now wished he had never brought those baby pictures into his remedial-reading class.

Harold reported to Saul that Gordy’s death was the biggest and sometimes the only topic of conversation in the barbershop, and the talk often implicated Saul and Patsy, but ambiguously and circularly, and only because they had been standing nearby in the house when Gordy’s gun went off in the front yard. What
had
he been doing on their lawn, in front of that tree? What had he been doing there, off and on, all that year? No one could explain. It was mystifying, and Saul knew that his and Patsy’s proximity to Gordy’s death would mark them as accessories to the mystification.

The boy hadn’t previously threatened to kill himself or anyone else. He had displayed the gun the way other boys displayed their baseball cards. There had been no desperate spoken ultimatums. He hadn’t seemed particularly unhappy; he wasn’t atypical, unless you counted his attention deficits. As the days went on, Saul thought that Gordy had fired a bullet into his brain on a whim. MAD IN AMERICA . . . that was Gordy all over, committing suicide as a weirdly unpromising practical joke. Or: he had performed an auto-jihad. Even Bob Pawlak had no explanation. “Total surprise to me,” he said, shrugging. The autopsy turned up no drugs or alcohol in Gordy’s bloodstream. The other possibility, of a genuine despair, was somehow unthinkable in Gordy’s case. Certainly the gun itself wasn’t to blame. Was it? In any case, after the medical examiner’s autopsy, there was no funeral and no memorial service and no reminiscences about the boy. Gordy’s family couldn’t afford a funeral, his aunt had said (really, since no one except the aunt wanted to acknowledge him as kin, there was no family), and no one had much of anything to remark about Gordy’s life, such as it had been. What could you say about him? Like God, he was who he was. He was close to invisible, and then he had erased the only visibility he had. She said she would just scatter his ashes out in back of the trailer where he had lived. When Saul began to inquire over the telephone about this economizing, Gordy’s aunt asked him:
What
about Gordy, did he think, was worth remembering? He was better off held back in the past without anybody creating too much of a fuss over him now, she said. It occurred to Saul that Gordy’s aunt thought that suicides were shameful and that she had to get rid of him in a hurry. When she used those school words, “held back,” Saul felt himself shiver, as if someone’s fingers soaked in ice water were traveling down his spine. “No use crying over that boy anymore, no earthly use that I can see,” she said, in a call she made to Saul on a Saturday afternoon. “I’ve cried enough. Leave him be, resting in peace. Don’t you want him to rest in peace?”

The child Cossack, he thought, my adversary, he deserved better than this.

“Yes,” he said. “Only it makes me angry that he killed himself.”

“Angry?”

“Sure. I get mad when I think about it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t get
mad
about it,” she said. “I wouldn’t get riled up.” Saul didn’t have the impression that she really wanted to talk to him anymore; her voice had a smoky flaring-up and fading-back. She went on talking in her dazed way. “You aren’t responsible or anything. I’m not going to sue you or anybody else, is what I’m saying,” she said. “Despite what some people have been suggesting to me. Don’t you worry about that. I’m not going after your money now. Besides, I already thanked you for your generosity.”

Saul knew better than to respond, especially about money. After taking another breath, Brenda Bagley said that she
was
sorry that she hadn’t hidden the gun any better than she had. Gordy had found it squirreled away in a shoe box in her closet, where she had thought he’d never find it.

On the afternoon following this conversation, he and Brenda Bagley drove to the Five Oaks Funeral Home and picked up Gordy’s ashes in a plastic box. The funeral director, Lewis Binch, was an affable man in a pinstriped suit, perfectly tailored; his eyes were alert and searching in an Irish manner—the entire face displayed a resigned, comic intelligence as he sat behind his desk in his office, offering good-humored consolation. He seemed well acquainted with grief and was not frightened of it. Saul wondered how he hadn’t met this funeral director before; he wanted him as a friend and took his business card, hoping for another occasion to meet prior to a death, especially his own.

The box of ashes was as big as a dictionary, and its contents rattled; Saul estimated its weight at about twelve pounds. After driving Brenda Bagley back home, he carried the box into her trailer, following her. As soon as she was inside, she turned on the enormous television set and stood for a moment to see what programs were on. “You can put it over there,” she said, pointing to a sofa on which a white cat slept, while she watched the TV screen, as an old sea captain would watch a lighthouse. Saul laid the box of ashes on the sofa opposite the cat. He left without saying goodbye, while she went on watching the TV screen, avoiding shipwreck, though she waved absentmindedly as he walked out the door.

After the summer storms and the articles about Gordy’s death in the
Five
Oaks News-Chronicle,
accompanied by a lengthy and hard-hitting editorial about troubled children and guns, and the terrible inexplicable epidemic of student violence in American schools, Patsy went to her OB-GYN and confirmed what she already knew, that she was newly pregnant. She did not say that Gordy’s death had inspired the two of them to create this child; some things you
didn’t
have to tell Saul.

When she informed Saul that night at dinner about her pregnancy, he stood up at the table and walked over to where she sat to kiss her and hug her. His joy was manufactured for her benefit—she could instantly tell— but manufactured joy was better than none at all, and she admired his efforts to be glad on her behalf. He himself would be glad spontaneously, in time. His feelings needed some duration to establish themselves on whatever solid ground Saul might find.

The stain of Gordy’s blood on the linden wouldn’t wash off: Saul had tried soapsuds and Clorox, sponging the bark of the tree, until it came to him that he was being just like Gordy’s aunt, trying to wash all traces of him away, and he stopped.

For a week after that he watched television. It was like taking a bath in forgetfulness. Whatever they had on television wasn’t good or bad: it was just television. If you put a Vermeer on television, it stopped being a Vermeer and turned into something else on television.

Sometimes he watched with Mary Esther perched in his lap. He combed her hair idly, shook her music-box teddy bear, bounced her, fed her, read
Pat the Bunny,
and sang “Little Red Caboose” to her when the mood struck him. He began to hope for certain commercials to reappear, the ones with happy tunes. Whenever she fussed, he carried her around the house and then outside. He did not sleep consistently at night. He wasn’t unhappy, nor was he depressed; he just wasn’t anything—this was how he explained it to himself. He was preoccupied by a certain variety of nothingness, full of colors and moods. It was a kingdom, and he had just made his respectful way through the front gate. Patsy stayed up with him as long as she could, holding his hand, and then she went to bed.

It made no sense to try to love one’s enemy when the enemy was already dead. It was a stupid spiritual practice, and Christian, besides.

After enduring another week of this, Patsy came downstairs one morning and told Saul that he should take a trip somewhere, anywhere, just for a few days, to let the miles soak up in him. He needed to travel, to watch the telephone poles fly by in their sedative manner. It wasn’t that she wanted him out of the house; she just thought that he needed to get away. He didn’t hunt or fish—he didn’t have any of those male outdoorsy escape valves—but he could at least go to one or two cities and visit the museums. That would be a nice Saul thing to do, she said, before school started again and he found himself extemporizing in one classroom or another. She could manage Mary Esther on her own for a few days.

Following her advice, he called ahead to a few friends and then packed several days’ worth of clean clothes. He didn’t like to fly because airport terminals and their long receding concourses reminded him of gigantic vacuum-cleaner hoses sucking him and everyone else into nullity. He preferred taking the train.

At the doors of the Detroit Amtrak station he leaned into the car and kissed Patsy and Mary Esther goodbye. He took the train to Washington on a coach ticket he had bought on the Web. He arrived at Union Station three hours late. For two nights he stayed with a couple he knew, Buzz Henselt and his girlfriend, Sarah. The two of them lived in a walkup near Cleveland Heights in the District and were doing moderately well— Sarah worked for a writers-in-the-schools project, and Buzz, who was good at budget analysis, had landed a job in the Department of Transportation—but Saul realized that he was in a fog and wasn’t keeping up his end of the conversation, particularly when Buzz and Sarah asked him about himself and Patsy and Mary Esther. All he could say was, “Oh, we’re fine,” before lapsing into silence and staring at their Edward Hopper poster (the house, not the nighthawks) framed on the living-room wall, or the Ralston Crawford poster in the dining room. He realized that his presence there was a puzzle to them. He was an inexplicable and unsatisfying guest. He wasn’t terribly interested in them anymore and answered their questions as if he were talking about someone else or taking a quiz, and, no, as it turned out, he
didn’t
want to go to the National Gallery.