Saul and Patsy (26 page)

“Yes,” Saul said, because he himself could have said it about Patsy.

“Anyway,” Howie said, “I had to come out here and ask you to be my best man, and also, before Lis and I are married, to give you what I want to give you.”

“What’s that?”

“About two million dollars,” Howie said.

“That’s a lot of money,” Saul said, in a blank, not registering at all what his brother had said.

“Well, it’s in equities from various companies out there I’ve bought into, and you can’t sell them, as I’ll explain to you tomorrow, because that would be illegal. It’s all paper wealth. Is there any more wine in there, in the kitchen?”

“Yes,” Saul said, so numb that he felt that he might have had a stroke. “Come with me.”

When they were in the kitchen, the front door opened, and Patsy came in the house with a noisy bustle, and she sang out, “Saul! The scapegoating has started! We have to move! We have to move out of this place.” Then she began singing.
“We gotta get out of this place! If it’s the last thing we
ever do!”

He and Howie came out of the kitchen, and when Patsy saw Saul’s brother, she said, “Oh, Howie.” She kissed him. “So that was
your
BMW. What a nice surprise. Sorry you caught me singing.” They gave each other brotherly-sisterly kisses—Saul watched them do it.

“Love,” Howie said, unwrapping his charm before her, smiling. “You can sing anytime.”

Howie picked up Emmy, and he made kissing noises as he looked in her brown eyes. He kissed his niece on the cheek, and in return she smiled at him broadly, which she had never done so rapidly with a stranger before.

“She’s very solid,” said Howie, once so fragile himself.

Seventeen

“What a beautiful woman,” Patsy said, holding Howie’s photograph of his fiancée. She and Saul, tag-teaming, had taken Emmy upstairs, changed her into a fresh diaper and her pink pajamas, sung to her, and watched her fall asleep. Now they were together in the living room, the three of them drinking white wine and examining the picture of Howie’s Lis.

“Saul thinks she looks like you,” Howie said, glancing at Patsy. He was slurring his words a bit. “I said she didn’t.”

“She doesn’t look at all like me. Her hair is different from mine, for one thing.”

“She certainly
does
look like you,” Saul muttered crossly, staring at his wife, as if he were the final authority on all questions of resemblance.

“You guys. No, she’s not a bit like me. The only female in the world who looks a lot like me,” Patsy said, “is my daughter. Howie, you’re a lucky man. When’s the wedding date?”

“Next summer.” He then lowered himself from his chair onto the floor. There, on the floor, he continued his side of the conversation as he performed stretch exercises. He said he was stiff from the day’s drive. “We’re going to be married in Golden Gate Park. Lis wants to honeymoon in Hawaii, and she’s found a place on Maui where you can walk and go on excursions if you want to, or you can just stay right there, and it’s still Paradise. There are plans, and more plans, and more plans after that, about this wedding. You don’t even want to know about all these plans.
I
can’t keep track of them all. I never knew getting married was so complicated. It’s like managing a merger. Strategy and paperwork.”

Patsy and Saul glanced at each other.

“But the main thing is, Saul, you have to be my best man, and the other main thing is how beautiful Emmy is.” As if under silent orders for a fixed routine, he then sat down and did a runner’s stretch on the other side of the coffee table, with one leg behind him and one in front. “What a beautiful daughter. You two are so lucky. Except for living in Five Oaks.”

“Well, there’s another one coming,” Patsy said, patting herself, ignoring his remark about their very wonderful city. She explained to Howie that this one was a boy and that the due date was May thirteenth.

Howie stood up, holding his arms entangled with each other in front and then behind him, wrenching them from side to side for flexibility.

“Hey, congratulations. Or do you withhold congratulations until the baby is born? Patsy,” he said, “there’s one thing I have to ask about. When you came home, you said the scapegoating had started. What did you mean?”

He lowered himself to the floor. While he did several push-ups, Patsy told him about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. Saul sat in his chair, watching his brother’s exercises without commenting on them or on the Gordy Himmelman story that Patsy was telling. Public calesthenics had seemingly turned into acceptable social behavior. The only time Saul allowed himself a reaction occurred when Patsy reported that she had talked to Anne McPhee and then had driven over to Brenda Bagley’s house. Saul’s face took on a raised-eyebrow attentiveness. Howie’s reaction was minimal, though he had a peevish expression as he listened and exercised, as if the story were a mind pollutant.

“You do have to get out of this place,” Howie told them tonelessly, finishing his last push-up and taking a breather in a sitting position, his hands on his hips.

“Nothing doing,” Saul said. “I’m staying. I have to. I’m on a mission.
We
are.”

“And what would that mission be?” He took on an expression of petulance.

“I don’t know,” Saul explained. “In due time, the mission will reveal itself.”

“Your mission is to get out of the Midwest, Saul, before something here balls up its fist and hits you. Come out to the Bay Area. We’ll go into business together.”

“Well,” Saul said, “I’m going to bed. See you in the morning, maybe.”

“I made up the guest room,” Patsy told Howie, yawning. “Uh, Howie, could you tell me one thing, before you go to bed?”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Saul told me when we were upstairs that you were going to give us some money.”

“I already
have
given you some money. Well, not money, but equities. That is, I’ve bought some stocks and put them in Saul’s name. You’re my family, you see. Anyone would do this. And I thought it was time to spread the wealth around. There’s money to spare. I won’t miss it.”

“How much is this?”

“About two million dollars,” Howie said. “But it’s not in blue chips. They’re kind of risky little companies, what I bought you. Lots of
marginal enterprises
. Techno stocks, things like that, e-commerce stuff. That’s how I . . . well, never mind. The thing is, you shouldn’t sell them. You should hold on to them for years. If you sell them, you’ll be sorry. You can just go on right here with your lit——your life now as it is. Pretend all this money doesn’t exist.”

“You’re kidding! We can’t take this!” Patsy said. “You have to be joking! You can’t give us two million dollars! You can’t. That’s crazy. We’ll be ruined.”

“Yes, I can,” he said, heading toward the stairs, his hand already on the newel post.

“I’m not taking any of this . . .
largesse,
” Patsy said. “I’m giving it all back to you.”

“Actually,” Howie said, just before he turned around, “the stocks are already in Saul’s name. If you want to give them away, it’s his decision, to tell you the honest truth.”

“What would we do with two million dollars?” Patsy cried out in agony.

“Anything you want.”

In the middle of the sleepless night (to her surprise and dismay, Saul had fallen asleep immediately—a very aggressive thing for him to have done), on one of her several trips to the bathroom to pee, Patsy heard a spattering sound like that of a bird flying into a window, and then another: two impacts. Whack—pause—wham. They came from downstairs, and Patsy could feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up. One blow was an accident; but two were deliberate. Two meant intention and human volition. Two meant harm.

The floor, as she ran down to the living room, felt unclean and unwelcoming to her bare feet, no longer hers, provisional: the carpeting was gritty and the wood slats squeaked. In the living room Patsy stood in darkness, studying the front window, where two egg yolks and the raw white of the egg surrounding them dribbled down the glass windowpane. Far in the distance she saw the white bleached albino hairs as the Himmel-perpetrators disappeared into the night.

So it had started. Somewhere, out there in the dark, someone had thrown two raw eggs at the house, and then, in all probability, had run off, sick with laughter or righteousness. Gordy, with his visits, was gone physically but now his substitutes were doing their methodical retributive work. Perhaps there would be escalation: rotten tomatoes, toilet paper, followed by firecrackers, then arson, then, finally, gunshots. Or painted swastikas. Of the punishing of good deeds there would be no discernible end. All at once the idea of owning a handgun made perfect sense to her. Staring out through the window, she crossed her arms over her chest. But she didn’t feel like herself; her body was always surprising her nowadays. Her breasts were so big, she still wasn’t used to them. Her feet were swollen, and her arms were getting thick and muscular.

Her mouth had gone instantly dry and she could hear what remained of her saliva as she swallowed.

It wasn’t her own safety she worried about so much as that of her children. Emmy and Theo didn’t deserve encirclement, to be brought up as the stigmatized children of God’s outcasts, or, even worse, as the children of millionaires.

When she returned to the upstairs hallway, Howie was standing there in his pajamas. Even in the dark he had an aura about him, attractive at the surface level but not quite to her taste at any particular depth. Getting up from bed, he would still be perfectly groomed, forever unmussed, his hair in order, his odors still concealed by soap and cologne. The stink of humanity was absent from him.

“What happened?” he whispered. He was studying her nightgown gnomishly, but in the dark there was precious little to see. “I heard something.”

“Weren’t you sleeping?”

“I never sleep,” he said, with a trace of pride. His face in the near-dark had a perfect symmetry, the eyes like gentle X-rays. Patsy noticed his chest and thought:
Hmm, family resemblance.

“Well, we got egged.”

Mary Esther muttered quietly in her sleep from one room, and Saul groaned in his sleep from another. They were alike in that respect: they both vocalized in their dreams.

“You got what? Egged?” He leaned forward toward her.

“It’s complicated. The kids around here think we’re responsible for that boy, Gordy’s, suicide. They’ve formed a Gordy cult. It’s called Himmelism. Goth stuff. Come down and see for yourself,” she said. She took his hand and led him across the hallway toward the stairs, where she let go of him and reached out for the sticky bannister, grubby from child-and-baby productions.

On the first floor, she led him to the front room and showed him the egg yolks on the window.

“Ah,” Howie said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Golems.”

“What?”

“Golems. Jewish mythology from three or four centuries ago. They’re automatons made out of clay by rabbis. They’re created to be servants— but they always run amuck and the rabbi has to destroy them.” He gazed at the window. “So now I guess they’re running amuck. Did Saul make them in his spare time?”

“Nice theory,” Patsy said. “But I think these kids are all-Americans. How come you know about golems? That’s not Delia’s line. Or yours either.”

Howie shrugged. “Mom took Saul and me to the Jewish Cultural Center when we were kids. That’s about the only Jewish thing we ever did. And all I remember from those sessions were the myths and stories. The first time I saw the marching broomsticks in
Fantasia,
I thought: Yeah, golems.” He smiled at her in the dark.

“Hey,” she said, “let’s go into the kitchen. If you can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep, we might as well sit up together. Come on.” She inclined her head. “We’ll wait for the sun to come up if we have to.”

After they had arranged themselves in the lightless kitchen, Patsy on a chair near the refrigerator and Howie close enough to the counter so that he could lean his head against it, they sat drinking tap water from glasses Patsy had purchased, years ago, at the hardware store. They had no elegance; she liked the sense of commonality, of plain making-do, when she served drinks in these glasses to guests like Howie. If you were going to be elegant, the true note would have to come from somewhere else. The digital clocks on the stove and the microwave gave off sufficient illumination so that she could see where Howie was sitting, but she could not quite tell what expression was on his face, which suited her. There was an aspect to Howie that was not quite domesticated, that was unsafe, and dangerous to look upon. He could be oddly arousing.

“Tell me more about Emmy,” Howie asked, and Patsy was touched that he would ask about Emmy even if he might not be interested in children generally—single men usually weren’t—a curiosity evoked for the sake of the appearances that Howie spent so much of his time trying to keep up. “Tell me what she’s like,” he suggested companionably, though the request contained a hint of his business side, his wish to issue commands.

“Oh,” Patsy said, “she’s already an individual. They’re individuals the minute they come out of the womb. Emmy’s very sensitive to sounds. She first turned her head in the crib when she heard the singing of a bird outside the window. She’s demanding, you know, like most kids—she likes to have the same things happen in the same way all the time—and she’s still learning that she can’t always get what she wants, but that’s a stage. That’s how infants turn into children. She’s going to have a good sense of humor as a little girl and as a woman, I can tell. She’s very curious about everything. Her first word was ‘Wzzat?’”

“I was wondering,” Howie said from his dark corner, “if you like her. I mean, I know you’re her mother, of course, so you love her, but I was wondering if you liked her, too.”

“What a question!” She waited, trying to unpack Howie’s subtext. Failing at it, she said, “Of course I like her. Mothers always like their children.”

“No,” Howie said. “I don’t think so. Nice to say so, but no. I don’t think my mother ever liked me very much. She protected me because I was sickly, but that’s different.
Loved
—sure, of course. But it’s a weird scene when your parents don’t like you, don’t feel that friendly affinity, and I don’t think my mother ever did. We were sort of peripheral to her concerns.”

“You know, she had an affair with her yard boy last summer.”

“Yes. She finally told me.” He sounded bored by the subject.

“What did you think of that?”

“I didn’t care for it,” Howie said. “I think she should act her age. She’s a predator.”

“Well, I kind of liked it, myself,” Patsy said, careful not to reveal that Howie’s mother had also told her that she had loved the kid, at least a little. “I give her credit. I take off my hat to her.”

“For what?” Howie asked.

“For guts. For nerve. For being an older woman who can still take steps.”

“Steps. Ha. She’s not
your
mother,” Howie observed. “When it’s your mother, it gets . . . strange.”

“Howie,” Patsy said in the dark, using her flattest voice, “we can’t take your charity. We just can’t.”

“It’s not charity. It’s an investment in you two. Did you talk to Saul?”

“No,” Patsy said, “I didn’t. I just can’t stand the idea of being a millionaire. It would turn Saul and me into . . . I don’t know—
villains
.”

“Then give it away to someone else,” Howie said with equanimity. “Give it to charity. Give it to your children.”

“It’ll turn
them
into villains.” She shifted in her chair. She had an odd, fugitive idea that Howie liked talking to women in total darkness, that it answered some early-childhood need of his.

At that moment another flying egg hit the outside of the kitchen window. Patsy glanced at it, decided to ignore it, and because she ignored it, so did Howie. What the hell. They were being egged. It wasn’t the end of the world. You could always clean it up.