The Corrections: A Novel (47 page)

And from the deck immediately below him came a windborne giggle. It came again, a trilling squeal, a northern lark.

He edged away from the spheres and cylinders and leaned out past the outer railing. A few yards farther astern was a small “Nordic” sunbathing area, sequestered behind cedar fencing, and a man standing where no passenger was permitted to stand could see right over the fencing and behold Signe Söderblad, her chill-stippled arms and thighs and belly, the plump twin cloudberries into which a suddenly gray winter sky had drawn her nipples, the quaking ginger fur between her legs.

The day world floated on the night world and the night world tried to swamp the day world and he worked and worked to keep the day world watertight. But there had been a grievous breach.

Came another cloud then, larger, denser, that turned the gulf below it to a greenish black. Ship and shadow in collision.

And shame and despair—

Or was it the wind catching the sail of his raincoat?

Or was it the ship’s pitching?

Or the tremor in his legs?

Or the corresponding tremor of the engines?

Or a fainting spell?

Or vertigo’s standing invitation?

Or the relative warmth of open water’s invitation to someone soaked and freezing in the wind?

Or was he leaning, deliberately, to glimpse again the gingery mons?

“How fitting it is,” said internationally noted investment counselor Jim Crolius, “to be talking money on a Nordic Pleasurelines Luxury Fall Color Cruise. Folks, it’s a beautiful sunny morning, isn’t it?”

Crolius was speaking from a lectern beside an easel on which the title of his talk—“Surviving the Corrections”—was written in purple ink. His question brought murmurs of assent from the first few rows in front of him, the people who’d arrived early for good seats. Someone up there even said: “Yes,
Jim
!”

Enid felt ever so much better this morning, but a few atmospheric disturbances still lingered in her head, for example a squall now consisting of (a) resentment of the women who’d come to the Longstocking Ballroom absurdly early, as if the potential lucrativeness of Jim Crolius’s advice might somehow decline with one’s distance from him, and (b) particular resentment of the pushy New York kind of woman who elbowed in ahead of everyone to establish a first-name relationship with a lecturer (she was sure that Jim Crolius could see right through their presumption and hollow flattery, but he might be too polite to ignore them and focus on less pushy and more deserving midwestern women such as Enid), and (c) intense irritation with Alfred for having stopped in a bathroom
twice
on the way to breakfast, which had prevented her from leaving the Kierkegaard Room early and securing a good front-row seat herself.

Almost as soon as the squall had gathered it disappeared, however, and the sun shone strongly again.

“Well, I hate to break it to you folks in the back,” Jim Crolius was saying, “but from where
I
stand, up here by the windows, I can see some clouds on the horizon. Those could be friendly little white clouds. Or they could be dark rain
clouds. Appearances can be deceiving! From where I stand I may think I see a safe course ahead, but I’m no expert. I may be piloting the ship straight into a reef. Now, you wouldn’t want to sail on a ship without a captain, would you? A captain who’s got all the maps and gadgets, all the bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. Right? You got your radar, you got your sonar, you got your Global Positioning System,” Jim Crolius was counting off each instrument on his fingers. “You got your satellites up in outer space! It’s all pretty technical. But somebody’s got to have that information, or we could all be in big trouble. Right? This is a
deep
ocean. This is your
life
. So what I’m saying is you may not want to master all that technical stuff personally, all the bells and whistles, the whole nine yards. But you better hope you’ve got a good captain when you go cruising the high seas of high finance.”

There was applause from the front rows.

“He must literally think we’re eight years old,” Sylvia Roth whispered to Enid.

“This is just his introduction,” Enid whispered back.

“Now, another way this is fitting,” Jim Crolius continued, “is that we’re here to see the changing leaves. The year has its rhythms—winter, spring, summer, fall. The whole thing is cyclical. You got your upswings in the spring, you got your downturns in the fall. It’s just like the market. Cyclical business, right? You can have a bull market for five, ten, even fifteen years. We’ve seen it in our lifetime. But we’ve also seen corrections. I may look like I’m just a kid, but I’ve even seen a genuine market
break
in my lifetime. Scary stuff. Cyclical business. People, we’ve got a lot of green out there right now. It’s been a long, glorious summer. In fact, let me see a show of hands here, how many of you are paying for this cruise, either entirely or in part, on the strength of your investments?”

Forest of raised hands.

Jim Crolius nodded with satisfaction. “Well, folks, I hate to break it to you, but those leaves are starting to turn. No matter how green things are for you right now, it’s not going to survive the winter. Of course, every year is different, every cycle’s different. You never know exactly when that green is going to turn. But we’re here, every one of us, because we’re foresighted people. Every person in this room has proved to me she’s a smart investor, just by virtue of being here. You know why?
Because it was still summer when
you left home
. Every person in this room had the foresight to know that something was going to change on this cruise. And the question we all have—I’m speaking in metaphors here—the question is: Will all that glorious green out there turn to glorious gold? Or will it all just wither on the branch in the winter of our discontent?”

The Longstocking Ballroom was electric with excitement now. There were murmurs of “Marvelous! Marvelous!”

“More matter and less art,” Sylvia Roth said dryly.

Death, Enid thought. He was talking about death. And all the people clapping were so
old
.

But where was the sting of this realization? Asian had taken it away.

Jim Crolius turned now to the easel and flipped over the first of its big newsprint pages. The second page was headed
WHEN THE CLIMATE CHANGES
, and the categories—Funds, Bonds, Common Stock, etc.—drew a gasp from the front row out of all proportion to the informational content. For an instant it seemed to Enid as if Jim Crolius were doing a technical market analysis of the kind that her broker in St. Jude had told her never to pay attention to. Discounting the minimal effects of wind drag at low velocities, something “plummeting” (a thing of value “plunging” in a “free fall”) experienced an acceleration due to gravity of 32 feet per second squared, and, acceleration being the second-order derivative of distance, the analyst could integrate once
over the distance the object had fallen (roughly 30 feet) to calculate its velocity (42 feet per second) as it passed the center of a window 8 feet tall, and assuming a 6-foot-long object, and also assuming for simplicity’s sake a constant velocity over the interval, derive a figure of approximately four-tenths of a second of full or partial visibility. Four-tenths of a second wasn’t much. If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprece-dentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years; to notice that he was wearing the
awful
black raincoat which had lost its shape and should never have been worn in public but which he’d willfully packed for the trip and willfully carried with him everywhere; to experience not only the certainty that something terrible had happened but also a peculiar sense of intrusion, as if you were witnessing an event that nature had never intended you to witness, like the impact of a meteorite or the copulation of whales; and even to observe the expression on your husband’s face, to register its almost youthful beauty, its peculiar serenity, for who could have anticipated the grace with which the raging man would fall?

He was remembering the nights he’d sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from
Black Beauty
or
The Chronicles of Narnia
. How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of
doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

Robin Passafaro
was a Philadelphian from a family of troublemakers and true believers. Robin’s grandfather and her uncles Jimmy and Johnny were all unreconstructed Teamsters; the grandfather, Fazio, had served under the Teamsters boss Frank Fitzsimmons as a national vice president and had run the biggest Philly local and mishandled the dues of its 3,200 members for twenty years. Fazio had survived two racketeering indictments, a coronary, a laryngectomy, and nine months of chemotherapy before retiring to Sea Isle City on the Jersey coast, where he still hobbled out onto a pier every morning and baited his crab traps with raw chicken.

Uncle Johnny, Fazio’s eldest son, got along well on two kinds of disability (“chronic and severe lumbar pain,” the claim forms stated), his seasonal cash-only house-painting business, and his luck or talent as an online day trader. Johnny lived near Veterans Stadium with his wife and their youngest daughter in a vinyl-sided row house that they’d expanded until it filled their tiny lot, from the sidewalk to the rear property line; a flower garden and a square of Astro turf were on the roof.

Uncle Jimmy (“Baby Jimmy”) was a bachelor and the site manager for IBT Document Storage, a cinder-block mausoleum that the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, in more optimistic times, had built on the industrial banks of the Delaware and later, because only three (3) loyal
Teamsters had ever opted for interment in its thousand fireproof vaults, converted into a long-term repository for corporate and legal paper. Baby Jimmy was famous in local NA circles for having hooked himself on methadone without ever trying heroin.

Robin’s father, Nick, was Fazio’s middle child and the only Passafaro of his generation who never got with the Teamster program. Nick was the family brain and a committed Socialist; the Teamsters with their Nixonian and Sinatran allegiances were anathema to him. Nick married an Irish girl and pointedly moved out to racially integrated Mount Airy and embarked on a career of teaching high-school social studies in the city district, daring principals to fire him for his ebullient Trotskyism.

Nick and his wife, Colleen, had been told that they were infertile. They adopted a year-old boy, Billy, a few months before Colleen became pregnant with Robin—the first of three daughters. Robin was a teenager before she learned that Billy was adopted, but her earliest emotional memories from childhood, she told Denise, were of feeling helplessly
privileged
.

There was probably a good diagnostic label for Billy, corresponding to abnormal EEG waveforms or troubled red nodules or black lacunae on his CAT scan and to hypothetical causes like severe neglect or cerebral trauma in his preadoptive infancy; but his sisters, Robin especially, knew him simply as a terror. Billy soon figured out that no matter how cruel he was to Robin, she would always blame herself. If she lent him five dollars, he made fun of her for thinking he would pay it back. (If she complained to her father, Nick just gave her another five.) Billy chased her with the grasshoppers whose legs he’d clipped the ends off, the frogs he’d bathed in Clorox, and he told her—he meant it as a joke—“I hurt them because of you.” He put turds of mud in Robin’s dolls’ underpants. He called her Cow Clueless and
Robin No-Breast. He stuck her forearm with a pencil and broke the lead off deep. The day after a new bicycle of hers disappeared from the garage, he turned up with a good pair of black roller skates that he said he’d found on Germantown Avenue and that he used to rocket around the neighborhood in the months while she was waiting for another bike.

Their father, Nick, had eyes for every injustice in the First and Third Worlds except those of which Billy was the author. By the time Robin started high school, Billy’s delinquency had driven her to padlock her closet, stuff Kleenex in the keyhole of her bedroom door, and sleep with her wallet beneath her pillow; but even these measures she took more sadly than angrily. She had little to complain of and she knew it. She and her sisters were poor and happy in their big falling-down house on Phil-Ellena Street, and she went to a good Quaker high school and then to an excellent Quaker college, both on full scholarships, and she married her college boyfriend and had two baby girls, while Billy was going down the tubes.

Nick had taught Billy to love politics, and Billy had repaid him by taunting him with the epithet
bourgeois liberal, bour
geois liberal
. When this failed to incense Nick sufficiently, Billy befriended the other Passafaros, who were predisposed to love any traitor in the family traitor’s family. After Billy was arrested on his second felony charge and Colleen threw him out of the house, his Teamster relatives gave him something of a hero’s welcome. It was a while before he fully wore it out.

He lived for a year with his Uncle Jimmy, who well into his fifties felt happiest among like-minded adolescents with whom he could share his large collections of guns and knives, Chasey Lain videos, and Warlords III and Dungeonmaster paraphernalia. But Jimmy also worshipped Elvis Presley at a shrine in one corner of his bedroom, and Billy, who never got it through his head that Jimmy wasn’t joking about Elvis,
finally desecrated the shrine in some grievous and irreversible manner that Jimmy afterward refused to talk about, and was put out on the street.