The Corrections (71 page)

She slumped onto her heels, her knees on the stone-cold floor.
Little Rock. Seniority. Simpler if I just quit
.

Absently, she raised the lid of a Yuban can. It was full to the brim with lurid orange fermented piss.

“Oh boy,” she said to the shotgun.

As she ran up to her bedroom and put on her coat and gloves, she felt sorriest about her mother, because no matter how often and how bitterly Enid had complained to her, she’d never got it through her head that life in St. Jude had turned into such a nightmare; and how could you permit yourself to breathe, let alone laugh or sleep or eat well, if you were unable to imagine how hard another person’s life was?

Enid was at the dining-room curtains again, looking out for Chip.

“Going for a walk!” Denise called as she closed the front door behind her.

Two inches of snow lay on the lawn. In the west the clouds were breaking up; violent eye-shadow shades of lavender and robin’s-egg blue marked the cutting edge of the latest cold front. Denise walked down the middle of tread-marked twilit streets and smoked until the nicotine had dulled her distress and she could think more clearly.

She gathered that Don Armour, after the Wroth brothers had bought the Midland Pacific and commenced their downsizing of it, had failed to make the cut for Little Rock and had gone to Alfred and complained. Maybe he’d threatened to brag about his conquest of Alfred’s daughter or maybe he’d asserted his rights as a quasi member of the Lambert family; either way, Alfred had told him to go to hell.
Then Alfred had gone home and examined the underside of his workbench.

Denise believed that there had been a scene between Don Armour and her father, but she hated to imagine it. How Don Armour must have loathed himself for crawling to his boss’s boss’s boss and trying to beg or blackmail inclusion in the railroad’s move to Little Rock; how betrayed Alfred must have felt by this daughter who’d won such praise for her work habits; how dismally the entire intolerable scene must have turned on the insertion of Don Armour’s dick into this and that guilty, unexcited orifice of hers. She hated to think of her father kneeling beneath his workbench and locating that penciled heart, hated the idea of Don Armour’s drecky insinuations entering her father’s prudish ears, hated to imagine how keenly it offended a man of such discipline and privacy to learn that Don Armour had been roaming and poking through his house at will.

It was never my intention to involve you in this
.

Well, and sure enough: her father had resigned from the railroad. He’d saved her privacy. He’d never breathed a word of any of this to Denise, never given any sign of thinking less of her. For fifteen years she’d tried to pass for a perfectly responsible and careful daughter, and he’d known all along that she was not.

She thought there might be comfort in this idea if she could manage to keep it in her head.

As she left her parents’ neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen. Denise unbuttoned her coat and turned back, taking a shortcut through the field behind her old grade school.

She’d never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical
rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

Alfred, likewise, had shown his faith in her by taking her at face value: by declining to pry behind the front that she presented. She’d felt happiest with him when she was publicly vindicating his faith in her: when she got straight A’s; when her restaurants succeeded; when reviewers loved her.

She understood, better than she would have liked to, what a disaster it had been for him to wet the bed in front of her. Lying on a stain of fast-cooling urine was not the way he wished to be with her. They only had one good way of being together, and it wasn’t going to work much longer.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away. She understood this better than Chip and Gary did, and so she felt a particular responsibility for him.

To Chip, unfortunately, it seemed that Alfred cared about his children only to the degree that they succeeded. Chip was so busy feeling misunderstood that he never noticed how badly he himself misunderstood his father. To Chip, Alfred’s inability to be tender was the proof that Alfred didn’t know, or care, who he was. Chip couldn’t see what everyone around him could: that if there was anybody in the world whom Alfred did love purely for his own sake, it was Chip. Denise was aware of not delighting Alfred like this; they had little in common beyond formalities and achievements. Chip was the one whom Alfred had called for in the middle of the night, even though he knew Chip wasn’t there.

I made it as clear to you as I could
, she told her idiot brother in her head as she crossed the snowy field.
I can’t make it any
clearer
.

The house to which she returned was full of light. Gary or Enid had swept the snow from the front walk. Denise was
scuffing her feet on the hemp mat when the door flew open.

“Oh, it’s you,” Enid said. “I thought it might be Chip.”

“No. Just me.”

She went in and pried her boots off. Gary had built a fire and was sitting in the armchair closest to it, a stack of old photo albums at his feet.

“Take my advice,” he told Enid, “and forget about Chip.”

“He must be in some sort of trouble,” Enid said. “Otherwise he would have called.”

“Mother, he’s a sociopath. Get it through your head.”

“You don’t know a thing about Chip,” Denise said to Gary.

“I know when somebody refuses to pull his weight.”

“I just want us all to be together!” Enid said.

Gary let out a groan of tender sentiment. “Oh, Denise,” he said. “Oh, oh. Come and see this baby girl.”

“Maybe another time.”

But Gary crossed the living room with the photo album and foisted it on her, pointing at the photo image on a family Christmas card. The chubby, mop-headed, vaguely Semitic little girl in the picture was Denise at about eighteen months. There was not a particle of trouble in her smile or in the smiles of Chip and Gary. She sat between them on the living-room sofa in its pre-reupholstered instantiation; each had an arm around her; their clear-skinned boy faces nearly touched above her own.

“Is that a cute little girl?” Gary said.

“Oh, how darling,” Enid said, crowding in.

From the center pages of the album fell an envelope with a Registered Mail sticker. Enid snatched it up and took it to the fireplace and fed it directly to the flames.

“What was that?” Gary said.

“Just that Axon business, which is taken care of now.”

“Did Dad ever send half the money to Orfic Midland?”

“He asked me to do it but I haven’t yet. I’m so swamped with insurance forms.”

Gary laughed as he went upstairs. “Don’t let that twenty-five hundred burn any holes in your pocket.”

Denise blew her nose and went to peel potatoes in the kitchen.

“Just in case,” Enid said, joining her, “be sure there’s enough for Chip. He said this afternoon at the latest.”

“I think it’s officially evening now,” Denise said.

“Well, I want a
lot
of potatoes.”

All of her mother’s kitchen knives were butter-knife dull. Denise resorted to a carrot scraper. “Did Dad ever tell you why he didn’t go to Little Rock with Orfic Midland?”

“No,” Enid said emphatically. “Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“He told them yes, he was going. And, Denise, it would have made
all
the difference for us financially. It would have nearly doubled his pension, just those two years. We would have been in so much better shape now. He told me he was going to do it, he agreed it was the right thing, and then he came home three nights later and said he’d changed his mind and quit.”

Denise looked into the eyes semireflected in the window above the sink. “And he never told you why.”

“Well, he couldn’t stand those Wroths. I assumed it was a personality clash. But he never talked about it with me. You know—he never tells me anything. He just decides. Even if it’s a financial disaster, it’s his decision and it’s final.”

Here came the waterworks. Denise let potato and scraper fall into the sink. She thought of the drugs she’d hidden in the Advent calendar, she thought they might stop her tears long enough to let her get out of town, but she was too far from where they were stashed. She’d been caught defenseless in the kitchen.

“Sweetie, what is it?” Enid said.

For a while there was no Denise in the kitchen, just mush and wetness and remorse. She found herself kneeling on the rag rug by the sink. Little balls of soaked Kleenex surrounded her. She was reluctant to raise her eyes to her mother, who was sitting beside her on a chair and feeding her dry tissues.

“So many things you think are going to matter,” Enid said with a new sobriety, “turn out not to matter.”

“Some things still matter,” Denise said.

Enid gazed bleakly at the unpeeled potatoes by the sink. “He’s not going to get better, is he.”

Denise was happy to let her mother think that she’d been crying about Alfred’s health. “I don’t think so,” she said.

“It’s probably not the medication, is it.”

“It probably isn’t.”

“And there’s probably no point in going to Philadelphia,” Enid said, “if he can’t follow instructions.”

“You’re right. There probably isn’t.”

“Denise, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“I knew something was wrong this morning,” Enid said. “If you’d found that envelope three months ago, he would have exploded at me. But you saw today. He didn’t do a thing.”

“I’m sorry I put you on the spot there.”

“It didn’t even matter. He didn’t even know.”

“I’m sorry anyway.”

The lid on a pot of white beans boiling on the stove began to rattle. Enid stood up to reduce the heat. Denise, still kneeling, said, “I think there’s something in the Advent calendar for you.”

“No, Gary pinned the last ornament.”

“In the ‘twenty-four’ pocket. There might be something for you.”

“Well, what?”

“I don’t know. You might go check, though.”

She heard her mother make her way to the front door and then return. Although the pattern of the rag rug was complex, she thought she would soon have it memorized from staring.

“Where did these come from?” Enid said.

“I don’t know.”

“Did you put them there?”

“It’s a mystery.”

“You must have put them there.”

“No.”

Enid set the pills on the counter, took two steps away from them, and frowned at them severely. “I’m sure whoever put these there meant well,” she said. “But I don’t want them in my house.”

“That’s probably a good idea.”

“I want the real thing or I don’t want anything.”

With her right hand Enid herded the pills into her left hand. She dumped them into the garbage grinder, turned on water, and ground them up.

“What’s the real thing?” Denise said when the noise subsided.

“I want us all together for one last Christmas.”

Gary, showered and shaved and dressed in his aristocratic style, entered the kitchen in time to catch this declaration.

“You’d better be willing to settle for four out of five,” he said, opening the liquor cabinet. “What’s wrong with Denise?”

“She’s upset about Dad.”

“Well, it’s about time,” Gary said. “There’s plenty to be upset about.”

Denise gathered up the Kleenex balls. “Pour me a lot of whatever you’re having,” she said.

“I thought we could have Bea’s champagne tonight!” Enid said.

“No,” Denise said.

“No,” Gary said.

“We’ll save it and see if Chip comes,” Enid said. “Now, what’s taking Dad so long upstairs?”

“He’s not upstairs,” Gary said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Al?” Enid shouted. “
AL?
”

Gases snapped in the neglected fire in the living room. White beans simmered on moderate heat; the registers breathed warm air. Out in the street somebody’s tires were spinning on snow.

“Denise,” Enid said. “Go see if he’s in the basement.”

Denise didn’t ask “Why me?” although she wanted to. She went to the top of the basement stairs and called her father. The basement lights were on, and she could hear a cryptic faint rustling from the workshop.

She called again: “Dad?”

There was no answer.

Her fear, as she descended the stairs, was like a fear from the unhappy year of her childhood when she’d begged for a pet and received a cage containing two hamsters. A dog or a cat might have harmed Enid’s fabrics, but these young hamsters, a pair of siblings from a litter at the Driblett residence, were permitted in the house. Every morning, when Denise went to the basement to give them pellets and change their water, she dreaded to discover what new deviltry they’d hatched in the night for her private spectation—maybe a nest of blind, wriggling, incest-crimson offspring, maybe a desperate pointless wholesale rearrangement of cedar shavings into a single great drift beside which the two parents were trembling on the bare metal of the cage’s floor, looking bloated and evasive after eating all their children, which couldn’t have left an agreeable aftertaste, even in a hamster’s mouth.

The door to Alfred’s workshop was shut. She tapped on it. “Dad?”

Alfred’s reply came immediately in a strained, strangled bark: “Don’t come in!”

Behind the door something hard scraped on concrete.

“Dad? What are you doing?”

“I said don’t come in!”

Well, she’d seen the gun and she was thinking: Of course it’s me down here. She was thinking: And I have no idea what to do.

“Dad, I have to come in.”

“Denise—”

“I’m coming in,” she said.