The Corrections (20 page)

“Dad, it’s a nice sentiment. I understand the feeling,
but—”

“I doubt you do.”

“That railroad was raped and eviscerated by the Wroth brothers.”

“I will not discuss it any further.”

“This is sick! This is sick!” Gary said. “You’re being
loyal to a corporation that screwed you and the city of St. Jude in every
conceivable way. It’s screwing you again,
right now
, with your
health insurance.”

“You have your opinion, I have mine.”

“And I’m saying you’re being irresponsible. You’re being
selfish. If you want to eat peanut butter and pinch pennies, that’s your
business, but it’s not fair to Mom and it’s not fair
to—”

“I don’t give a damn what you and your mother think.”

“It’s not fair to me! Who’s going to pay
your bills if you get in trouble? Who’s your fallback?”

“I will endure what I have to endure,” Alfred said. “Yes, and
I’ll eat peanut butter if I have to. I like peanut butter. It’s a
good food.”

“And if that’s what Mom has to eat, she’ll eat it, too. Right?
She can eat dog food if she has to! Who cares what
she
wants?”

“Gary, I know what the right thing to do is. I don’t expect you to
understand—I don’t understand the decisions you make—but I
know what’s fair. So let that be the end of it.”

“I mean, give Orfic Midland twenty-five hundred dollars if you absolutely
have to,” Gary said. “But that patent is worth—”

“Let that be the end of it, I said. Your mother wants to talk to you
again.”

“Gary,” Enid cried, “the St. Jude Symphony is doing
The
Nutcracker
in December! They do a beautiful job with the regional ballet,
and it sells out
so
fast, tell me, do you think I should get nine tickets
for the day of Christmas Eve? They have a two o’clock matinee, or we can
go on the night of the twenty-third, if you think that’s better. You
decide.”

“Mother, listen to me. Do not let Dad accept that offer. Don’t let
him do anything until I’ve seen the letter. I want you to put a copy of it
in the mail to me tomorrow.”

“OK, I will, but I’m thinking the important thing right now is
The
Nutcracker
, to get nine tickets all together, because it sells out
so
fast
, Gary, you wouldn’t believe.”

When he finally got off the phone, Gary pressed his hands to his eyes and saw,
engraved in false colors on the darkness of his mental movie screen, two images
of golf: Enid improving her lie from the rough (
cheating
was the word for
this) and Alfred making light of his badness at the game.

The old man had pulled the same kind of self-defeating stunt fourteen years ago,
after the Wroth brothers bought
the Midland Pacific.
Alfred was a few months shy of his sixty-fifth birthday when Fenton Creel, the
Midpac’s new president, took him to lunch at Morelli’s in St. Jude.
The top echelon of Midpac executives had been purged by the Wroths for having
resisted the takeover, but Alfred, as chief engineer, had not been a part of
this palace guard. In the chaos of shutting down the St. Jude office and moving
operations to Little Rock, the Wroths needed somebody to keep the railroad
running while the new crew, headed by Creel, learned the ropes. Creel offered
Alfred a fifty percent raise and a block of Orfic stock if he would stay on for
two extra years, oversee the move to Little Rock, and provide continuity.

Alfred hated the Wroths and was inclined to say no, but that night, at home, Enid
went to work on him. She pointed out that the Orfic stock alone was worth
$78,000, that his pension would be based on his last three full years’
salary, and that here was a chance to increase their retirement income by fifty
percent.

These irresistible arguments appeared to sway Alfred, but three nights later he
came home and announced to Enid that he’d tendered his resignation that
afternoon and that Creel had accepted it. Alfred was then seven weeks short of a
full year at his last, largest salary; it made no sense at all to quit. But he
gave no explanation, then or ever, to Enid or to anyone else, for his sudden
turnabout. He simply said:
I have
made my decision
.

At the Christmas table in St. Jude that year, moments after Enid had sneaked onto
baby Aaron’s little plate a bite of hazelnut goose stuffing and Caroline
had grabbed the stuffing from the plate and marched into the kitchen and flung
it in the trash like a wad of goose crap, saying, “This is pure
grease—yuck,” Gary lost his temper and shouted:
You
couldn’t wait seven weeks? You couldn’t wait till you were
sixty-five?

Gary, I worked hard all my life. My retirement is my
business
,
not yours
.

And the man so keen to retire that he couldn’t wait those last seven weeks:
what had he done with his retirement? He’d sat in his blue chair.

Gary knew nothing of Axon, but Orfic Midland was the sort of conglomerate whose
holdings and management structure he was paid to stay abreast of. He happened to
know that the Wroth brothers had sold their controlling stake to cover losses in
a Canadian gold-mining venture. Orfic Midland had joined the ranks of the
indistinguishable bland megafirms whose headquarters dotted the American exurbs;
its executives had been replaced like the cells of a living organism or like the
letters in a game of Substitution in which shit turned to shot and soot and foot
and food, so that, by the time Gary had okayed the latest bulk purchase of
OrficM
for CenTrust’s portfolio, no blamable human trace
remained of the company that had shut down St. Jude’s third-largest
employer and eliminated train service to much of rural Kansas. Orfic Midland was
out of the transportation business altogether now. What survived of the
Midpac’s trunk lines had been sold off to enable the company to
concentrate on prison-building, prison management, gourmet coffee, and financial
services; a new 144– strand fiber-optic cable system lay buried in the
railroad’s old right-of-way.

This was the company to which Alfred felt loyal?

The more Gary thought about it, the angrier he got. He sat by himself in his
study, unable to stem his rising agitation or to slow the steam-locomotive pace
at which his breaths were coming. He was blind to the pretty pumpkin-yellow
sunset unfolding in the tulip trees beyond the commuter tracks. He saw nothing
but the principles at stake.

He might have sat there obsessing indefinitely, marshaling evidence against his
father, had he not heard a rustling
outside the study
door. He jumped to his feet and pulled the door open.

Caleb was cross-legged on the floor, studying his catalogue. “Can I talk to
you now?”

“Were you sitting out here listening to me?”

“No,” Caleb said. “You said we could talk when you were done. I
had a question. I was wondering what room I could put under
surveillance.”

Even upside down Gary could see that the prices for the equipment in
Caleb’s catalogue—items with brushed-aluminum cases, color LCD
screens—were three-and four-figure.

“It’s my new hobby,” Caleb said. “I want to put a room
under surveillance. Mom says I can do the kitchen if it’s OK with
you.”

“You want to put the kitchen under surveillance as a hobby?”

“Yeah!”

Gary shook his head. He’d had many hobbies when he was a boy, and for a
long time it had pained him that his own boys seemed to have none at all.
Eventually Caleb had figured out that if he used the word “hobby,”
Gary wobby,” Garuld green-light expenditures he otherwise might have
forbidden Caroline to make. Thus Caleb’s hobby had been photography until
Caroline had bought him an autofocus camera, an SLR with a better zoom telephoto
lens than Gary’s own, and a digital point-and-shoot camera. His hobby had
been computers until Caroline had bought him a palmtop and a notebook. But now
Caleb was nearly twelve, and Gary had been around the block one too many times.
His guard was up regarding hobbies. He’d extracted from Caroline a promise
not to buy Caleb more equipment of any kind without consulting with him
first.

“Surveillance is not a hobby,” he said.

“Dad, yes it is! Mom was the one who suggested it.
She said I could start with the kitchen.”

It seemed to Gary another Warning Sign of depression that his thought was:
The
liquor cabinet is in the kitchen
.

“Better let me talk about this with Mom, all right?”

“But the store’s only open till six,” Caleb said.

“You can wait a few days. Don’t tell me you can’t.”

“But I’ve been waiting all afternoon. You said you’d talk to
me, and now it’s almost night.”

That it was almost night gave Gary clear title to a drink. The liquor cabinet was
in the kitchen. He took a step in its direction. “What equipment exactly
are we talking about?”

“Just a camera and a microphone and servo controls.” Caleb thrust the
catalogue at Gary. “See, I don’t even need the expensive kind. This
one’s just six fifty. Mom said it was OK.”

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that
his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering;
something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling,
too, was a Warning Sign.

“Caleb,” he said, “this sounds like something you’re
going to get bored with very soon. It sounds expensive and like you won’t
stay interested.”

“No! No!” Caleb said, anguished. “I’m
totally
interested. Dad, it’s a
hobby
.”

“You’ve gotten bored, though, pretty quickly with some of the other
things we’ve gotten you. Things you also said you were ‘very
interested in’ at the time.”

“This is different,” Caleb pleaded. “This time I’m
really, truly interested.”

Clearly the boy was prepared to spend any amount of devalued verbal currency to
buy his father’s acquiescence.

“Do you see what I’m saying, though?” Gary said. “Do
you see the pattern? That things look one way before you
buy them and another way afterward? Your feelings change after you buy things.
Do you see that?”

Caleb opened his mouth, but before he could utter another plea or complaint, a
craftiness flickered in his face.

“I guess,” he said with seeming humility. “I guess I see
that.”

“Well, do you think it’s going to happen with this new
equipment?” Gary said.

Caleb gave every appearance of giving the question serious thought. “I
think this is different,” he said finally.

“Well, OK,” Gary said. “But I want you to remember we had this
conversation. I don’t want to see this become just another expensive toy
you play with for a week or two and then neglect. You’re going to be a
teenager pretty soon, and I want to start seeing a little longer attention
span—”

“Gary, that isn’t fair!” Caroline said hotly. She was hobbling
from the doorway of the master bedroom, one shoulder hunched and her hand behind
her back, applying pressure to the soothing gelpack.

“Hello, Caroline. Didn’t realize you were listening.”

“Caleb is not neglecting things.”

“Right, I’m not,” Caleb said.

“What you don’t understand,” Caroline told Gary, “is that
everything’s getting used in this new hobby. That’s what’s so
brilliant about it. He’s figured out a way to use all that equipment
together in one—”

“Good, well, I’m glad to hear it.”

“He does something creative and you make him feel
guilty
.”

Once, when Gary had wondered aloud if giving Caleb so many gadgets might be
stunting his imagination, Caroline had all but accused him of slandering his
son. Among her favorite parenting books was
The Technological
Imagination:
What Today’s Children Have to Teach Their Parents
, in which
Nancy Claymore, Ph.D., contrasting the “tired
paradigm” of Gifted Child as Socially Isolated Genius with the
“wired paradigm” of Gifted Child as Creatively Connected Consumer,
argued that electronic toys would soon be so cheap and widespread that a
child’s imagination would no longer be exercised in crayon drawings and
made-up stories but in the synthesis and exploitation of existing
technologies—an idea that Gary found both persuasive and depressing. When
he was a boy not much younger than Caleb, his hobby had been building models
with Popsicle sticks.

“Does this mean we can go to the store now?” Caleb said.

“No, Caleb, not tonight, it’s almost six,” Caroline said.

Caleb stamped his foot. “This always happens! I wait and wait, and then it
gets too late.”

“We’ll rent a movie,” Caroline said. “We’ll get
whatever movie you want.”

“I don’t want a movie. I want to do surveillance.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Gary said. “So start dealing
with it.”

Caleb went to his room and slammed the door. Gary followed and flung it open.
“That’s enough now,” he said. “We don’t slam doors
in this house.”

“You slam doors!”

“I don’t want to hear another word from you.”

“You slam doors!”

“Do you want to spend the whole week in your room?”

Caleb replied by crossing his eyes and sucking his lips into his mouth: not
another word.

Gary let his gaze drift into corners of the boy’s room that he ordinarily
took care not to look at. Neglected in piles, like the loot in a thief’s
apartment, was new photographic and computer and video equipment with an
aggregate retail value possibly exceeding the annual salary of Gary’s
secretary at CenTrust. Such a riot of luxury in the lair of an eleven-year-old!
Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been
holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary’s neural pathways.
A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a
wave of nausea down his vagus: a “sense” that he survived from day
to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more
compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your
tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you.