The Corrections (40 page)

“Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee,” Mr. Söderblad said, “I can’t fall asleep at night.”

Enid’s hopes that Alfred might take her dancing in the Pippi Longstocking Ballroom were dashed when he stood up and announced that he was going to bed. It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet. Who ever heard of a grownup going to bed at seven in the evening?

“Sit down and wait for dessert,” she said. “The desserts are supposed to be
divine
.”

Alfred’s unsightly napkin fell from his thighs to the floor. He seemed without inkling of how much he was embarrassing and disappointing her. “You stay,” he said. “I’ve had enough.”

And away across the Søren Kierkegaard broadloom he lurched, battling shifts in the horizontal which had grown more pronounced since the ship left New York Harbor.

Familiar waves of sorrow for all the fun she couldn’t have with such a husband dampened Enid’s spirits until it occurred to her that she now had a long evening to herself and no Alfred to spoil her fun.

She brightened, and brightened further when Mr. Roth departed for the Knut Hamsun Reading Room, leaving his wife at the table. Mrs. Roth switched seats to be closer to Enid.

“We Norwegians are great readers,” Mrs. Nygren took the opportunity to remark.

“And great yakkers,” Mr. Söderblad muttered.

“Public libraries and bookstores in Oslo are thriving,” Mrs. Nygren informed the table. “I think it is
not
the same elsewhere. Reading is mostly in decline around the world. But not in Norway, hm. My Per is reading the complete works of John Galsworthy for the second time this autumn. In English.”

“Nooo, Inga, nooo,” Per Nygren whinnied. “Third time!”

“My God,” said Mr. Söderblad.

“It’s true.” Mrs. Nygren looked at Enid and Mrs. Roth as though anticipating awe. “Each year Per reads one work by every winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and also the complete works of his favorite winner from his previous year’s reading. And you see, each year the task becomes a bit more difficult, because there has been another winner, you see.”

“It is a bit like raising the bar in a high jump,” Per explained. “Every year a bit more challenging.”

Mr. Söderblad, who by Enid’s count was drinking his eighth cup of coffee, leaned close to her and said, “My God these people are boring!”

“It is safe to say that I have read more deeply into Henrik Pontoppidan than most,” Per Nygren said.

Mrs. Söderblad tilted her head, smiling dreamily. “Do you know,” she said, perhaps to Enid or to Mrs. Roth, “that until one hundred years ago Norway was a colony of Sweden?”

The Norwegians erupted like a batted hive.

“Colony!? Colony??”

“Oh, oh,” Inga Nygren hissed, “I
think
there is a history here that our American friends deserve to—”

“This is a story of strategic alliances!” Per declared.

“By ‘colony’ what is the exact word in Swedish that you are groping for,
Mrs
. Söderblad? Since my English is obviously much stronger than yours, perhaps I can offer our American friends a more accurate translation, such as ‘
equal
partner in a unified peninsular kingdom
’?”

“Signe,” Mr. Söderblad observed wickedly to his wife, “I do believe you’ve hit a nerve.” He raised a hand. “Waiter, refill.”

“If one chooses as a vantage point the late ninth century,” Per Nygren said, “and I suspect that even our Swedish friends will concede that the ascension of Harald the Blond is
quite a reasonable ‘hopping-off place’ for our examination of the seesaw relationship of two great rival powers, or should I perhaps say
three
great powers, since Denmark as well plays a rather fascinating role in our story—”

“We’d love to hear it, but maybe another time,” Mrs. Roth interrupted, leaning over to touch Enid’s hand. “Remember we said seven o’clock?”

Enid was only briefly bewildered. She excused herself and followed Mrs. Roth into the main hall, where they encountered a crush of seniors and gastric aromas, disinfectant aromas.

“Enid, I’m Sylvia,” said Mrs. Roth. “How do you feel about slot machines? I’ve had a physical craving all day.”

“Oh, me too!” Enid said. “I think they’re in the Stringbird Room.”

“Strindberg, yes.”

Enid admired quickness of mind but seldom credited herself with possessing it. “Thanks for the—you know,” she said as she followed Sylvia Roth through the crush.

“Rescue. Don’t mention it.”

The Strindberg Room was packed with kibitzers, low-stakes blackjack players, and lovers of the slot. Enid couldn’t remember when she’d had so much fun. The fifth quarter she dropped brought her three plums; as if so much fruit upset the bowels of her machine, specie gushed from its nether parts. She shoveled her take into a plastic bucket. Eleven quarters later it happened again: three cherries, a silver dump. White-haired players losing steadily at neighboring machines gave her dirty looks. I’m embarrassed, she told herself, although she wasn’t.

Decades of insufficient affluence had made her a disciplined investor. From her winnings she set aside the amount of her initial investment. Half of every payoff she also salted away.

Her playing fund showed no sign of exhaustion, however.

“So, I’ve had my fix,” Sylvia Roth said after nearly an hour, tapping Enid on the shoulder. “Shall we go hear the string quartet?”

“Yes! Yes! It’s in the Greed Room.”

“Grieg,” said Sylvia, laughing.

“Oh, that is funny, isn’t it? Grieg. I’m so stupid tonight.”

“How much did you make? You seemed to be doing well.”

“I’m not sure, I didn’t count.”

Sylvia smiled at her intently. “I think you did, though. I think you counted exactly.”

“All right,” Enid said, blushing because she was liking Sylvia so much. “It was a hundred thirty dollars.”

A portrait of Edvard Grieg hung in a room of actual gilt ornateness that recalled the eighteenth-century splendor of Sweden’s royal court. The large number of empty chairs confirmed Enid’s suspicion that many of the cruise participants were low-class. She’d been on cruises where the classical concerts were SRO.

Although Sylvia seemed less than knocked dead by the musicians, Enid thought they were wonderful. They played,
from memory
, popular classical tunes such as “Swedish Rhapsody” and excerpts from
Finlandia
and
Peer Gynt
. In the middle of
Peer Gynt
the second violinist turned green and left the room for a minute (the sea really was a bit stormy, but Enid had a strong stomach and Sylvia had a patch) and then returned to his chair and managed to find his place again without, as it were, missing a beat. The twenty people in the audience shouted, “Bravo!”

At the elegant reception afterward Enid spent 7.7 percent of her gambling earnings on a cassette tape recorded by the quartet. She tried a complimentary glass of Spögg, a Swedish liqueur currently enjoying a $15 million marketing campaign. Spögg tasted like vodka, sugar, and horseradish, which in fact were its ingredients. As their fellow guests reacted to
Spögg with looks of surprise and reproach, Enid and Sylvia fell to giggling.

“Special treat,” Sylvia said. “Complimentary Spögg. Try some!”

“Yum!” Enid said in stitches, snorting for air. “Spögg!”

Then it was on to the Ibsen Promenade for the scheduled ten o’clock ice cream social. In the elevator it seemed to Enid that the ship was suffering not only from a seesaw motion but also from a yaw, as if its bow were the face of someone experiencing repugnance. Leaving the elevator, she almost fell over a man on his hands and knees like half a two-man prank involving shoving. On the back of his T-shirt was a punch line:
THEY JUST LOSE THEIR AIM
.

Enid accepted an ice cream soda from a food handler in a toque. Then she initiated an exchange of family data with Sylvia which quickly became an exchange more of questions than of answers. It was Enid’s habit, when she sensed that family was not a person’s favorite topic, to probe the sore relentlessly. She would sooner have died than admit that her own children disappointed her, but hearing of other people’s disappointing children—their squalid divorces, their substance abuse, their foolish investments—made her feel better.

On the surface, Sylvia Roth had nothing to be ashamed of. Her sons were both in California, one in medicine and the other in computers, and both were married. Yet they seemed to be hot conversational sands to be avoided or crossed at a sprint. “Your daughter went to Swarthmore,” she said.

“Yes, briefly,” Enid said. “So, and
five
grandsons, though. My goodness. How old is the youngest?”

“He was two last month, and what about you?” Sylvia said. “Any grandkids?”

“Our oldest son, Gary, has three sons, but so, that’s interesting, a five-year gap between the youngest and the next youngest?”

“Nearly six, actually, and your son in New York, I want to hear about him, too. Did you stop and see him today?”

“Yes, he made a lovely lunch but we didn’t get down to see his office at the
Wall Street Journal
where he has a new job because the weather was bad, so, and do you get out much to California? To see your grandsons?”

Some spirit, a willingness to play the game, left Sylvia. She sat peering into her empty soda glass. “Enid, will you do me a favor?” she said finally. “Come upstairs and have a nightcap.”

Enid’s day had begun in St. Jude at five in the morning, but she never declined an attractive invitation. Upstairs in the Lagerkvist Taproom she and Sylvia were served by a dwarf in a horned helmet and leather jerkin who persuaded them to order cloudberry akvavit.

“I want to tell you something,” Sylvia said, “because I have to tell someone on the ship, but you can’t breathe a word of this to anyone. Are you good at keeping secrets?”

“It’s one thing I do well.”

“Then, good,” Sylvia said. “Three days from now there’s going to be an execution in Pennsylvania. So, and two days after that, on Thursday, Ted and I have our fortieth anniversary. And if you ask Ted, he’ll tell you that’s why we’re on this cruise, for the anniversary. He’ll tell you that, but it’s not the truth. Or it’s only a truth about Ted and not me.”

Enid felt afraid.

“The man who’s being executed,” Sylvia Roth said, “killed our daughter.”

“No.”

The blue clarity of Sylvia’s gaze made her seem a beautiful, lovable animal that was not, however, quite human. “Ted and I,” she said, “are on this cruise because we have a problem with this execution. We have a problem with each other.”

“No! What are you telling me?” Enid shuddered. “Oh, I can’t stand to hear this! I can’t stand to hear this!”

Sylvia quietly registered this allergy to her disclosure. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s not fair of me to ambush you. Maybe we should call it a night.”

But Enid quickly regained her composure. She was determined not to miss becoming Sylvia’s confidante. “Tell me everything you need to tell me,” she said. “And I’ll listen.” She folded her hands in her lap like a good listener. “Go ahead. I’m listening.”

“Then the other thing I have to tell you,” Sylvia said, “is that I’m a gun artist. I draw guns. You really want to hear this?”

“Yes.” Enid nodded eagerly and vaguely. The dwarf, she noticed, used a small ladder to fetch down bottles. “Interesting.”

For many years, Sylvia said, she’d been an amateur print-maker. She had a sun-filled studio in her house in Chadds Ford, she had a cream-smooth lithography stone and a twenty-piece set of German woodblock chisels, and she belonged to a Wilmington art guild in whose semi-annual show, while her youngest child, Jordan, grew from a tomboy into an independent young woman, she’d sold decorative prints for prices like forty dollars. Then Jordan was murdered and for five years Sylvia printed, drew, and painted nothing but guns. Year after year only guns.

“Terrible terrible,” Enid said with open disapproval.

The trunk of the wind-splintered tulip tree outside Sylvia’s studio suggested stocks and barrels. Every human form sought to become a hammer, a trigger guard, a cylinder, a grip. There was no abstraction that couldn’t be tracer fire, or the smoke of black powder, or a hollow-point’s flowering. The body was worldlike in the repleteness of its possibilities, and just as no part of this little world was safe from a bullet’s penetration, no form in the big world had no echo in a gun.
Even a pinto bean was like a derringer, even a snowflake like a Browning on its tripod. Sylvia wasn’t insane; she could force herself to draw a circle or sketch a rose. But what she hungered to draw was firearms. Guns, gunfire, ordnance, projectiles. She spent hours capturing in pencil the pattern of gleam on nickel plating. Sometimes she also drew her hands and her wrists and forearms in what she guessed (for she had never held a gun) were appropriate grips for a .50 caliber Desert Eagle, a nine-millimeter Glock, a fully automatic Μ16 with a folding aluminum stock, and other exotic weapons from the catalogues that she kept in brown envelopes in her sun-drenched studio. She abandoned herself to her habit like a lost soul to its hellishly fitting occupation (although Chadds Ford, the subtle warblers that ventured up from the Brandy-wine, the scents of warm cattail and fermenting persimmon that October winds stirred out of nearby hollows, staunchly resisted being made a hell of); she was a Sisypha who every night destroyed her own creations—tore them up, erased them in mineral spirits. Kindled a merry fire in the living room.

“Terrible,” Enid murmured again. “I can’t think of a worse thing that could happen to a mother.” She signaled to the dwarf for more cloudberry akvavit.

Some mysteries of her obsession, Sylvia said, were that she’d been raised as a Quaker and still went to meeting in Kennett Square; that the tools of Jordan’s torture and murder had been one roll of nylon-reinforced “strapping” tape, one dish towel, two wire coat hangers, one General Electric Light ’n Easy electric iron, and one WMF twelve-inch serrated bread knife from Williams-Sonoma, i.e., no guns; that the killer, a nineteen-year-old named Khellye Withers, had turned himself in to the Philadelphia police without (again) a gun being unholstered; that with a husband who earned a huge late-career salary as Du Pont’s vice president of Compliance, and a sport-utility vehicle so massive that a
head-on crash with a VW Cabriolet might hardly have dented it, and a six-bedroom Queen Anne—style house into whose kitchen and pantry Jordan’s entire Philadelphia apartment would have fit comfortably, Sylvia enjoyed a life of almost senseless ease and comfort in which her only task besides cooking for Ted, literally her only task, was to recover from Jordan’s death; that she nevertheless often became so absorbed in rendering the tooling on a revolver butt or the veins in her arm that she had to drive crazily fast to avoid missing her thrice-weekly therapy with an M.D./ Ph.D. in Wilmington; that by talking to the M.D./Ph.D., and by attending Wednesday-night sessions with other Parents of Victims of Violence and Thursday-night meetings with her Older Women’s group, and by reading the poetry and novels and memoirs and insight books that her friends recommended, and by relaxing with yoga and horseback riding, and by volunteering as a physical therapist’s assistant at Children’s Hospital, she succeeded in working through her grief even as her compulsion to draw guns intensified; that she mentioned this compulsion to no one, not even to the M.D./Ph.D. in Wilmington; that her friends and advisers all constantly exhorted her to “heal” herself through her “art”; that by “art” they meant her decorative woodcuts and lithos; that when she happened to see an old woodcut of hers in the bathroom or guest bedroom of a friend she twisted her body with shame at the fraudulence; that when she saw guns on TV or in a movie she writhed in a similar way and for similar reasons; that she was secretly convinced, in other words, that she had become a real artist, a genuinely good artist of the gun; that it was the proof of this artistry that she destroyed at the end of each day; that she was convinced that Jordan, despite having earned a B.F.A. in painting and an M.A. in art therapy, and despite the encouragement and paid instruction in art she’d received for twenty years, had not been a good artist; that after achieving this objective view of her dead
daughter she continued to draw guns and ammo; and that in spite of the rage and thirst for vengeance that her continuing obsession obviously betokened she had never once in five years drawn the face of Khellye Withers.