The Corrections (19 page)

“If you won’t talk about it,” he said, “I’ll tell
her we’re considering coming to St. Jude.”

“No way! That was not the agreement.”

“I’m proposing a one-time exception to the agreement.”

“No! No!” Wet tangles of blond hair lashed and twisted as Caroline
registered refusal. “You can’t change the rules like
that.”

“A one-time exception isn’t changing the rules.”

“God, I think I need an X-ray,” Caroline said.

Gary could feel the buzzing of his mother’s voice against his thumb.
“A yes or a no here?”

Standing up, Caroline leaned into him and buried her face in his sweater. She
knocked lightly on his sternum with
a little fist.
“Please,” she said, nuzzling his collarbone. “Tell her
you’ll call her later. Please? I really hurt my back.”

Gary held the phone out to one side, his arm rigid, as she pressed against him.
“Caroline. They’ve come here eight years in a row. It’s not
extreme of me to propose a one-time exception. Can I at least say we’re
considering the possibility?”

Caroline shook her head woefully and sank onto the chair.

“OK, fine,” Gary said. “I’ll make my own
decision.”

He strode into the dining room, where Aaron, who’d been listening, stared
at him as if he were a monster of spousal cruelty.

“Dad,” Caleb said, “if you’re not talking to Grandma, can
I ask you something?”

“No, Caleb, I’m talking to Grandma.”

“Then can I talk to you right afterward?”

“Oh, God, oh, God,” Caroline was saying.

In the living room Jonah had settled onto the larger leather sofa with his tower
of cookies and
Prince Caspian
.

“Mother?”

“I don’t understand this,” Enid said. “If it’s not
a good time to talk, all right, call me back, but to make me wait
ten
minutes
—”

“Yes, but here I am.”

“Well, so, and what have you decided?”

Before Gary could answer, there burst from the kitchen a piteous raw feline
wailing, a cry such as Caroline had produced during intercourse fifteen years
ago, before there were boys to hear her.

“Mom, sorry, one second.”

“This is not right,” Enid said. “This is not polite.”

“Caroline,” Gary called into the kitchen, “do you think we can
behave like adults for a few minutes?”

“Ah, ah, uh! Uh!” Caroline cried.

“Nobody ever died of a backache, Caroline.”

“Please,” she cried, “call her later. I tripped on the last
step when I was running inside, Gary, it
hurts
—”

He turned his back on the kitchen. “Sorry, Mom.”

“What on earth is going on there?”

“Caroline hurt her back a little bit playing soccer.”

“You know, I hate to say this,” Enid said, “but aches and pains
are a part of getting older. I could talk about pain all day long if I wanted
to. My hip is always hurting. As you get older, though, hopefully you get a
little more matoor.”

“Oh! Ahh! Ahh!” Caroline cried out voluptuously.

“Yeah, that’s the hope,” Gary said.

“Anyhow, what did you decide?”

“The jury’s still out on Christmas,” he said, “but maybe
you should plan on stopping here—”

“Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“It’s getting awfully late to be making Christmas
reservations,” Enid said severely. “You know, the Schumperts made
their Hawaii reservations back in April, because last year, when they waited
until September, they couldn’t get the seats they—”

Aaron came running from the kitchen. “Dad!”

“I’m on the phone, Aaron.”

“Dad!”

“I’m on the telephone, Aaron, as you can see.”

“Dave has a colostomy,” Enid said.

“You’ve got to do something
right now
,” Aaron said.
“Mom is really hurting. She says you have to drive her to the
hospital!”

“Actually, Dad,” said Caleb, sidling in with his catalogue,
“there’s someplace you can drive me, too.”

“No, Caleb.”

“No, but there’s a store I really actually do need to get
to?”

“The affordable seats fill up early,” Enid said.

“Aaron?” Caroline shouted from the kitchen.
“Aaron! Where are you? Where’s your father? Where’s
Caleb?”

“It certainly is noisy in here for a person trying to concentrate,”
Jonah said.

“Mother, sorry,” Gary said, “I’m going someplace
quieter.”

“It’s getting very
late
,” Enid said, in her voice the
panic of a woman for whom each passing day, each hour, signified the booking of
more seats on late-December flights and thus the particle-by-particle
disintegration of any hope that Gary and Caroline would bring their boys to St.
Jude for one last Christmas.

“Dad,” Aaron pleaded, following Gary up the stairs to the second
floor, “what do I tell her?”

“Tell her to call 911. Use your cell phone, call an ambulance.” Gary
raised his voice: “Caroline? Call 911!”

Nine years ago, after a midwestern trip whose particular torments had included
ice storms in both Philly and St. Jude, a four-hour runway delay with a whining
five-year-old and a screaming two-year-old, a night of wild vomiting by Caleb in
reaction (according to Caroline) to the butter and bacon fat in Enid’s
holiday cooking, and a nasty spill that Caroline took on her in-laws’
ice-covered driveway (her back trouble dated from her field-hockey days at
Friends’ Central, but she now spoke of having “reactivated”
the injury on that driveway), Gary had promised his wife that he would never
again ask her to go to St. Jude for Christmas. But now his parents had come to
Philly eight years in a row, and although he disapproved of his mother’s
obsession with Christmas—it seemed to him a symptom of a larger malaise, a
painful emptiness in Enid’s life—he could hardly blame his parents
for wanting to stay home this year. Gary also calculated that Enid would be more
willing to leave St. Jude and move east if she’d had her “one last
Christmas.” Basically, he was prepared to make the trip, and he expected a
modicum of
cooperation
from his wife: a mature willingness to
consider the special circumstances.

He shut himself inside his study and locked the door against the shouts and
whimpers of his family, the barrage of feet on stairs, the pseudo-emergency. He
lifted the receiver of his study phone and turned off the cordless.

“This is ridiculous,” Enid said in a defeated voice. “Why
don’t you call me back?”

“We haven’t quite decided about December,” he said, “but
we may very well come to St. Jude. In which case, I think you should stop here
after the cruise.”

Enid was breathing rather loudly. “We’re not making two trips to
Philadelphia this fall,” she said. “And I want to see the boys at
Christmas, and so as far as I’m concerned this means you’re coming
to St. Jude.”

“No, Mother,” he said. “No, no, no. We haven’t decided
anything.”

“I
promised
Jonah—”

“Jonah’s not buying the tickets. Jonah’s not in charge here. So
you make your plans, we’ll make ours, and hopefully everything will work
out.”

Gary could hear, with strange clarity, the rustle of dissatisfaction from
Enid’s nostrils. He could hear the seashore of her respiration, and all at
once he realized.

“
Caroline?
” he said. “
Caroline, are you on the
line?
”

The breathing ceased.

“
Caroline, are you eavesdropping? Are you on the line?
”

He heard a faint electronic click, a spot of static.

“Mom, sorry—”

Enid: “What on earth?”

Unbelievable! Unfuckingbelievable! Gary dropped the receiver on his desk,
unlocked the door, and ran down the hallway past a bedroom in which Aaron was
standing at his mirror with his brow wrinkled and his head at the Flattering
Angle, past the main staircase on which Caleb was clutching
his catalogue like a Jehovah’s Witness with a pamphlet, to the master
bedroom where Caroline was curled up fetally on a Persian rug, in her muddy
clothes, a frosty gelpack pressed into her lower back.

“
Are you eavesdropping on me?
”

Caroline shook her head weakly, perhaps hoping to suggest that she was too infirm
to have reached the phone by the bed.

“Is that a no? You’re saying no? You weren’t
listening?”

“No, Gary,” she said in a tiny voice.

“I heard the click, I heard the breathing—”

“No.”

“Caroline, there are three phones on this line, I’ve got two of them
in my study, and the third one’s right here. Hello?”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just picked up the phone—” She
inhaled through gritted teeth. “To see if the line was free. That’s
all.”

“And sat and listened! You were eavesdropping! Like we’ve talked and
talked and talked about not doing!”

“Gary,” she said in a piteous little voice, “I swear to you I
wasn’t. My back is killing me. I couldn’t reach to put the phone
back for a minute. I put it on the floor. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Please
be nice to me.”

That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for
ecstasy—that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and
red-cheeked and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on;
that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for
her—only deepened his feeling of betrayal. He stormed back up the hall to
his study and slammed the door. “Mother, hello, I’m
sorry.”

But the line was dead. He had to dial St. Jude now at his own expense. Through
the window overlooking the back yard he could see sunlit, clamshell-purple rain
clouds, steam rising off the monkey puzzle tree.

Because she wasn’t paying for the call, Enid sounded
happier. She asked Gary if he’d heard of a company called Axon.
“It’s in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania,” she said. “They
want to buy Dad’s patent. Here, I’ll read you the letter. I’m
a little upset about this.”

At CenTrust Bank, where Gary now ran the Equities Division, he’d long
specialized in large-cap securities and never much concerned himself with small
fry. The name Axon was not familiar to him. But as he listened to his mother
read the letter from Mr. Joseph K. Prager at Bragg Knuter & Speigh, he felt
he knew these people’s game. It was clear that the lawyer, in drafting a
letter and sending it to an old man with a midwestern address, had offered
Alfred no more than a tiny percentage of the patent’s actual value. Gary
knew the way these shysters worked. In Axon’s position he would have done
the same.

“I’m thinking we should ask for ten thousand, not five
thousand,” Enid said.

“When does that patent expire?” Gary said.

“In about six years.”

“They must be looking at big money. Otherwise they’d just go ahead
and infringe.”

“The letter says it’s experimental and uncertain.”

“Mother, exactly. That’s exactly what they want you to think. But if
it’s so experimental, why are they bothering with this at all? Why not
just wait six years?”

“Oh, I see.”

“It’s very, very good that you told me about this, Mother. What you
need to do now is write back to these guys and ask them for a $200,000 licensing
fee up front.”

Enid gasped as she’d done long ago on family car trips, when Alfred swung
into oncoming traffic to pass a truck. “
Two hundred thousand!
Oh,
my, Gary—”

“And a one percent royalty on gross revenues from their
process. Tell them you’re fully prepared to defend your legitimate
claim in court.”

“But what if they say no?”

“Trust me, these guys have no desire to litigate. There’s no downside
to being aggressive here.”

“Well, but it’s Dad’s patent, and you know how he
thinks.”

“Put him on the phone,” Gary said.

His parents were cowed by authority of all kinds. When Gary wanted to reassure
himself that he’d escaped their fate, when he needed to measure his
distance from St. Jude, he considered his own fearlessness in the face of
authority—including the authority of his father.

“Yes,” Alfred said.

“Dad,” he said, “I think you should go after these guys.
They’re in a very weak position and you could make some real
money.”

In St. Jude the old man said nothing.

“You’re not telling me you’re going to take that offer,”
Gary said. “Because that’s not even an option. Dad. That’s not
even on the menu.”

“I’ve made my decision,” Alfred said. “What I do is not
your business.”

“Yes, it is, though. I have a legitimate interest in this.”

“Gary, you do not.”

“I have a legitimate interest,” Gary insisted. If Enid and Alfred
ever ran out of money, it would fall to him and Caroline—not to his
undercapitalized sister, not to his feckless brother—to pay for their
care. But he had enough self-control not to spell this out for Alfred.
“Will you at least tell me what you’re going to do? Will you pay me
that courtesy?”

“You could pay me the courtesy of not asking,” Alfred said.
“However, since you ask, I will tell you. I’m going to
take what they offer and give half of the money to Orfic
Midland.”

The universe was mechanistic: the father spoke, the son reacted.

“Well, now, Dad,” Gary said in the low, slow voice he reserved for
situations in which he was very angry and very certain he was right. “You
can’t do that.”

“I can and I will,” Alfred said.

“No, really, Dad, you have to listen to me. There is absolutely no legal or
moral reason for you to split the money with Orfic Midland.”

“I was using the railroad’s materials and equipment,” Alfred
said. “It was understood that I would share any income from the patents.
And Mark Jamborets put me in touch with the patent lawyer. I suspect I was given
a courtesy rate.”

“That was fifteen years ago! The company no longer
exists
. The
people you had the understanding with are
dead
.”

“Not all of them are. Mark Jamborets is not.”