The Corrections (73 page)

He ran to the gate and boarded a 767 that then sat on the runway for four hours while a possibly faulty instrument in the cockpit was examined and finally, reluctantly, replaced.

The flight plan was a great-circle route to the great Polish city of Chicago, nonstop. Chip kept sleeping in order to forget that he owed Denise $20,500, was maxed out on his credit cards, and now had neither a job nor any prospect of finding one.

The good news in Chicago, after he’d cleared Customs, was that two rental-car companies were still doing business. The bad news, which he learned after standing in line for half an hour, was that people with maxed-out credit cards could not rent cars.

He went down the list of airlines in the phone book until he found one—Prairie Hopper, never heard of it—that had a seat on a St. Jude flight at seven the next morning.

By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay down on it to sleep. He didn’t understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski
masks. He’d lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he’d lost track of himself.

How strange, then, that the old man who opened the front door at nine-thirty in St. Jude the next morning seemed to know exactly who he was.

A holly wreath was on the door. The front walk was edged with snow and evenly spaced broom marks. The midwestern street struck the traveler as a wonderland of wealth and oak trees and conspicuously useless space. The traveler didn’t see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn’t simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages. The old street with its oak smoke and snowy flat-topped hedges and icicled eaves seemed precarious. It seemed mirage-like. It seemed like an exceptionally vivid memory of something beloved and dead.

“Well!” Alfred said, his face blazing with joy, as he took Chip’s hand in both of his. “Look who’s here!”

Enid tried to elbow her way into the picture, speaking Chip’s name, but Alfred wouldn’t let go of his hand. He said it twice more: “Look who’s here! Look who’s here!”

“Al, let him come in and close the door,” Enid said.

Chip was balking at the doorway. The world outside was black and white and gray and swept by fresh, clear air; the enchanted interior was dense with objects and smells and colors, humidity, large personalities. He was afraid to enter.

“Come in, come in,” Enid squeaked, “and shut the door.”

To protect himself from spells, he privately spoke an incantation:
I’m staying for three days and then I’m going back to
New York, I’m finding a job, I’m putting aside five hundred dollars
a month, minimum, until I’m out of debt, and I’m working every
night on the script
.

Invoking this charm, which was all he had now, the paltry sum of his identity, he stepped through the doorway.

“My word, you’re scratchy and smelly,” Enid said, kissing him. “Now, where’s your suitcase?”

“It’s by the side of a gravel road in western Lithuania.”

“I’m just happy you’re home safely.”

Nowhere in the nation of Lithuania was there a room like the Lambert living room. Only in this hemisphere could carpeting so sumptuously woolen and furniture so big and so well made and so opulently upholstered be found in a room of such plain design and ordinary situation. The light in the wood-framed windows, though gray, had a prairie optimism; there wasn’t a sea within six hundred miles to trouble the atmosphere. And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.

Chip apprehended it all in a heartbeat. The continent, his homeland. Scattered around the living room were nests of opened presents and little leavings of spent ribbon, wrapping-paper fragments, labels. At the foot of the fireside chair that Alfred always claimed for himself, Denise was kneeling by the largest nest of presents.

“Denise, look who’s here,” Enid said.

As if out of obligation, with downcast eyes, Denise rose and crossed the room. But when she’d put her arms around Chip and he’d squeezed her in return (her height, as always, surprised him), she wouldn’t let go. She
clung
to him—kissed his neck, fastened her eyes on him, and thanked him.

Gary came over and embraced Chip awkwardly, his face averted. “Didn’t think you were going to make it,” he said.

“Neither did I,” Chip said.

“Well!” Alfred said again, gazing at him in wonder.

“Gary has to leave at eleven,” Enid said, “but we can all have breakfast together. You get cleaned up, and Denise and
I will start breakfast. Oh, this is
just
what I wanted,” she said, hurrying to the kitchen. “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever had!”

Gary turned to Chip with his I’m-a-jerk face. “There you go,” he said. “Best Christmas present she’s ever had.”

“I think she means having all five of us together,” Denise said.

“Well, she’d better enjoy it in a hurry,” Gary said, “because she owes me a discussion and I’m expecting payment.”

Chip, detached from his own body, trailed after it and wondered what it was going to do. He removed an aluminum stool from the downstairs bathroom shower. The blast of water was strong and hot. His impressions were fresh in a way that he would either remember all his life or instantly forget. A brain could absorb only so many impressions before it lost the ability to decode them, to put them in coherent shape and order. His nearly sleepless night on a patch of airport carpeting, for example, was still very much with him and begging to be processed. And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. The tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by Enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building.

Denise’s shampoo had the pleasing, subtle scents of late-model Western capitalism. In the seconds it took Chip to lather his hair, he forgot where he was. Forgot the continent, forgot the year, forgot the time of day, forgot the circumstances. His brain in the shower was piscine or amphibian, registering impressions, reacting to the moment. He wasn’t far from terror. At the same time, he felt OK. He was hungry for breakfast and thirsty, in particular, for coffee.

With a towel around his waist he stopped in the living
room, where Alfred leaped to his feet. The sight of Alfred’s suddenly aged face, its disintegration-in-progress, its rednesses and asymmetries, cut Chip like a bullwhip.

“Well!” Alfred said. “That was quick.”

“Can I borrow some clothes of yours?”

“I will leave that to your judgment.”

Upstairs in his father’s closet the ancient shaving kits, shoehorns, electric razors, shoe trees, and tie rack were all in their accustomed places. They’d been on duty here each hour of the fifteen hundred days since Chip had last been in this house. For a moment he was angry (how could he not be?) that his parents had never moved anywhere. Had simply stayed here waiting.

He took underwear, socks, wool slacks, a white shirt, and a gray cardigan to the room that he’d shared with Gary in the years between Denise’s arrival in the family and Gary’s departure for college. Gary had an overnight bag open on “his” twin bed and was packing it.

“I don’t know if you noticed,” he said, “but Dad’s in bad shape.”

“No, I noticed.”

Gary put a small box on Chip’s dresser. It was a box of ammunition—twenty-gauge shotgun shells.

“He had these out with the gun in the workshop,” Gary said. “I went down there this morning and I thought, better safe than sorry.”

Chip looked at the box and spoke instinctively. “Isn’t that kind of Dad’s own decision?”

“That’s what I was thinking yesterday,” Gary said. “But if he wants to do it, he’s got other options. It’s supposed to be down near zero tonight. He can go outside with a bottle of whiskey. I don’t want Mom to find him with his head blown off.”

Chip didn’t know what to say. He silently dressed in the old man’s clothes. The shirt and pants were marvelously
clean and fit him better than he would have guessed. He was surprised, when he put the cardigan on, that his hands did not begin to shake, surprised to see such a young face in the mirror.

“So what have you been doing with yourself?” Gary said.

“I’ve been helping a Lithuanian friend of mine defraud Western investors.”

“Jesus, Chip. You don’t want to be doing that.”

Everything else in the world might be strange, but Gary’s condescension galled Chip exactly as it always had.

“From a strictly moral viewpoint,” Chip said, “I have more sympathy for Lithuania than I do for American investors.”

“You want to be a Bolshevik?” Gary said, zipping up his bag. “Fine, be a Bolshevik. Just don’t call
me
when you get arrested.”

“It would never occur to me to call you,” Chip said.

“Are you fellas about ready for breakfast?” Enid sang from halfway up the stairs.

A holiday linen tablecloth was on the dining table. In the center was an arrangement of pinecones, white holly and green holly, red candles, and silver bells. Denise was bringing food out—Texan grapefruit, scrambled eggs, bacon, and a stollen and breads that she’d baked.

Snow cover boosted the strong prairie light.

Per custom, Gary sat alone on one side of the table. On the other side, Denise sat by Enid and Chip by Alfred.

“Merry, merry, merry Christmas!” Enid said, looking each of her children in the eye in turn.

Alfred, head down, was already eating.

Gary also began to eat, rapidly, with a glance at his watch.

Chip didn’t remember the coffee being so drinkable in these parts.

Denise asked him how he’d gotten home. He told her the story, omitting only the armed robbery.

Enid, with a scowl of judgment, was following every move of Gary’s. “Slow
down
,” she said. “You don’t have to leave until eleven.”

“Actually,” Gary said, “I said quarter to eleven. It’s past ten-thirty, and we have some things to discuss.”

“We’re finally all together,” Enid said. “Let’s just relax and enjoy it.”

Gary set his fork down. “
I’ve
been here since Monday, Mother, waiting for us all to be together. Denise has been here since Tuesday morning. It’s not my fault if Chip was too busy defrauding American investors to get here on time.”

“I just explained why I was late,” Chip said. “If you were listening.”

“Well, maybe you should have left a little earlier.”

“What does he mean, defrauding?” Enid said. “I thought you were doing computer work.”

“I’ll explain it to you later, Mom.”

“No,” Gary said. “Explain it to her now.”

“Gary,” Denise said.

“No, sorry,” Gary said, throwing down his napkin like a gauntlet. “I’ve had it with this family! I’m done waiting! I want some answers
now
.”

“I was doing computer work,” Chip said. “But Gary’s right, strictly speaking, the intent was to defraud American investors.”

“I don’t approve of that at all,” Enid said.

“I know you don’t,” Chip said. “Although it’s a little more complicated than you might—”

“
What is so complicated about obeying the law?
”

“Gary, for God’s sake,” Denise said with a sigh. “It’s Christmas?”

“And you’re a thief,” Gary said, wheeling on her.

“
What?
”

“You know what I’m talking about. You sneaked into somebody’s room and you took a thing that didn’t belong—”

“Excuse me,” Denise said hotly, “I
restored
a thing that was stolen from its rightful—”

“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!”

“Oh, I’m not sitting here for this,” Enid wailed. “Not on Christmas morning!”

“No, Mother, sorry, you’re not going anywhere,” Gary said. “We’re going to sit here and have our little talk
right
now
.”

Alfred gave Chip a complicit smile and gestured at the others. “You see what I have to put up with?”

Chip arranged his face in a facsimile of comprehension and agreement.

“Chip, how long are you here for?” Gary said.

“Three days.”

“And, Denise, you’re leaving on—”

“Sunday, Gary. I’m leaving on Sunday.”

“So what’s going to happen on Monday, Mom? How are you going to make this house work on Monday?”

“I’ll think about that when Monday comes.”

Alfred, still smiling, asked Chip what Gary was talking about.

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“You really think you’re going to go to Philadelphia?” Gary said. “You think Corecktall’s going to fix all this?”

“No, Gary, I don’t,” Enid said.

Gary didn’t seem to hear her answer. “Dad, here, do me a favor,” he said. “Put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

“Gary, stop it,” Denise said.

Alfred leaned close to Chip and spoke confidentially. “What’s he asking?”

“He wants you to put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

“That’s a lot of nonsense.”

“Dad?” Gary said. “Come on, right hand, left shoulder.”

“
Stop it
,” Denise said.

“Let’s go, Dad. Right hand, left shoulder. Can you do that? You want to show us how you follow simple instructions? Come on!
Right hand. Left shoulder
.’”

Alfred shook his head. “One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need.”

“Al, I don’t
want
one bedroom and a kitchen,” Enid said.

The old man pushed his chair away from the table and turned once more to Chip. He said, “You can see it’s not without its difficulties.”

As he stood up, his leg buckled and he pitched to the floor, dragging his plate and place mat and coffee cup and saucer along with him. The crash might have been the last bar of a symphony. He lay on his side amid the ruins like a wounded gladiator, a fallen horse.