The Corrections: A Novel (76 page)

As soon as the front door had closed, Alfred made his way to the bathroom.

“Let’s all be happy,” Denise said, “that Gary got that off his chest and feels so much better now.”

“No, he’s right,” Enid said, her eyes resting bleakly on the holly centerpiece. “Something has to change.”

After breakfast the hours passed in the sickishness, the invalid waiting, of a major holiday. Chip in his exhaustion had trouble staying warm, but his face was flushed with the heat from the kitchen and the smell of baking turkey that blanketed the house. Whenever he entered his father’s field of vision, a smile of recognition and pleasure spread over Alfred’s face. This recognition might have had the character of mistaken identity if it hadn’t been accompanied by Alfred’s exclamation of Chip’s name. Chip seemed
beloved
to the old man. He’d been arguing with Alfred and deploring Alfred and feeling the sting of Alfred’s disapproval for most of his life, and his personal failures and his political views were, if anything, more extreme than ever now, and yet it was Gary who was fighting with the old man, it was Chip who brightened the old man’s face.

At dinner he took the trouble to describe in some detail his activities in Lithuania. He might as well have been reciting the tax code in a monotone. Denise, normally a paragon of listening, was absorbed in helping Alfred with his food, and Enid had eyes only for her husband’s deficiencies. She flinched or sighed or shook her head at every spilled bite,
every non sequitur. Alfred was quite visibly making her life a hell now.

I’m the least unhappy person at this table
, Chip thought.

He helped Denise wash the dishes while Enid spoke to her grandsons on the telephone and Alfred went to bed.

“How long has Dad been like this?” he asked Denise.

“Like this? Just since yesterday. But he wasn’t great before that.”

Chip put on a heavy coat of Alfred’s and took a cigarette outside. The cold was deeper than any he’d experienced in Vilnius. Wind rattled the thick brown leaves still clinging to the oaks, those most conservative of trees; snow squeaked beneath his feet.
Near zero tonight
, Gary had said.
He can go
outside with a bottle of whiskey
. Chip wanted to pursue the important question of suicide while he had a cigarette to enhance his mental performance, but his bronchi and nasal passages were so traumatized by cold that the trauma of smoke barely registered, and the ache in his fingers and ears—the damned rivets—was fast becoming unbearable. He gave up and hurried inside just as Denise was leaving.

“Where are you going?” Chip asked.

“I’ll be back.”

Enid, by the fire in the living room, was gnawing at her lip with naked desolation. “You haven’t opened your presents,” she said.

“Maybe in the morning,” Chip said.

“I’m sure I didn’t get you anything you’ll like.”

“It’s nice you got me anything.”

Enid shook her head. “This wasn’t the Christmas I’d hoped for. Suddenly Dad can’t do a thing. Not one single thing.”

“Let’s give him a drug holiday and see if that helps.”

Enid might have been reading bad prognoses in the fire. “Will you stay for a week and help me take him to the hospital?”

Chip’s hand went to the rivet in his earlobe as to a talisman. He felt like a child out of Grimm, lured into the enchanted house by the warmth and the food; and now the witch was going to lock him in a cage, fatten him up, and eat him.

He repeated the charm he’d invoked at the front door. “I can only stay three days,” he said. “I’ve got to start working right away. I owe Denise some money that I need to pay her back.”

“Just a
week
,” the witch said. “Just a week, until we see how things go in the hospital.”

“I don’t think so, Mom. I’ve got to go back.”

Enid’s bleakness deepened, but she didn’t seem surprised by his refusal. “I guess this is my responsibility, then,” she said. “I guess I always knew it would be.”

She retired to the den, and Chip put more logs on the fire. Cold drafts were finding ways through the windows, faintly stirring the open curtains. The furnace was running almost constantly. The world was colder and emptier than Chip had realized, the adults had gone away.

Toward eleven, Denise came inside reeking of cigarettes and looking two-thirds frozen. She waved to Chip and tried to go straight upstairs, but he insisted that she sit by the fire. She knelt and bowed her head, sniffling steadily, and put her hands out toward the embers. She kept her eyes on the fire as if to ensure that she not look at him. She blew her nose on a wet shred of Kleenex.

“Where’d you go?” he said.

“Just on a walk.”

“Long walk.”

“Yuh.”

“You sent me some e-mails that I deleted before I really read them.”

“Oh.”

“So what’s going on?” he said.

She shook her head. “Just everything.”

“I had almost thirty thousand dollars in cash on Monday. I was going to give you twenty-four thousand of it. But then we got robbed by uniformed men in ski masks. Implausible as that may sound.”

“I want to forgive that debt,” Denise said.

Chip’s hand went to the rivet again. “I’m going to start paying you a minimum of four hundred a month until the principal and interest are paid off. It’s my top priority. Absolute highest priority.”

His sister turned and raised her face to him. Her eyes were bloodshot, her forehead as red as a newborn’s. “I said I forgive the debt. You owe me nothing.”

“Appreciate it,” he said quickly, looking away. “But I’m going to pay you anyway.”

“No,” she said. “I’m not going to take your money. I forgive the debt. Do you know what ‘forgive’ means?”

In her peculiar mood, with her unexpected words, she was making Chip anxious. He pulled on the rivet and said, “Denise, come on. Please. At least show me the respect of letting me pay you back. I realize I’ve been a shit. But I don’t want to be a shit all my life.”

“I want to forgive that debt,” she said.

“Really. Come on.” Chip smiled desperately. “You’ve got to let me pay you.”

“Can you stand to be forgiven?”

“No,” he said. “Basically, no. I can’t. It’s better all around if I pay you.”

Still kneeling, Denise bent over and tucked in her arms and made herself into an olive, an egg, an onion. From within this balled form came a low voice. “Do you understand what a huge favor you’d be doing me if you would let me forgive the debt? Do you understand that it’s hard for me to ask this favor? Do you understand that coming here for Christmas is the only other favor I’ve ever asked you? Do
you understand that I’m not trying to insult you? Do you understand that I never doubted that you wanted to pay me back, and I know I’m asking you to do something very hard? Do you understand that I wouldn’t ask you to do something so hard if I didn’t really, really, really need it?”

Chip looked at the trembling balled human form at his feet. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’m having trouble on numerous fronts,” she said.

“This is a bad time to talk about the money, then. Let’s forget it for a while. I want to hear what’s bothering you.”

Still balled up, Denise shook her head emphatically, once. “I need you to say yes here, now. Say ‘Yes, thank you.’”

Chip made a gesture of utter bafflement. It was near midnight and his father had begun to thump around upstairs and his sister was curled up like an egg and begging him to accept relief from the principal torment of his life.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” he said.

“Would it help if I asked you for something else?”

“Tomorrow, OK?”

“Mom wants somebody here next week,” Denise said. “You could stay a week and help her. That would be a huge relief for me. I’m going to die if I stay past Sunday. I will literally cease to exist.”

Chip was breathing hard. The door of the cage was closing on him fast. The sensation he’d had in the men’s room at the Vilnius Airport, the feeling that his debt to Denise, far from being a burden, was his last defense, returned to him in the form of dread at the prospect of its being forgiven. He’d lived with the affliction of this debt until it had assumed the character of a neuroblastoma so intricately implicated in his cerebral architecture that he doubted he could survive its removal.

He wondered if the last flights east had left the airport or whether he might still escape tonight.

“How about we split the debt in half?” he said. “So I only
owe you ten. How about we both stay here till Wednesday?”

“Nope.”

“If I said yes,” he said, “would you stop being so weird and lighten up a little?”

“First say yes.”

Alfred was calling Chip’s name from upstairs. He was saying, “Chip, can you help me?”

“He calls your name even when you’re not here,” Denise said.

The windows shook in the wind. When had it happened that his parents had become the children who went to bed early and called down for help from the top of the stairs? When had this happened?

“Chip,” Alfred called. “I don’t understand this blanket. CAN YOU HELP ME?”

The house shook and the storms rattled and the draft from the window nearest Chip intensified; and in a gust of memory he remembered the curtains. He remembered when he’d left St. Jude for college. He remembered packing the hand-carved Austrian chessmen that his parents had given him for his high-school graduation, and the six-volume Sandburg biography of Lincoln that they’d given him for his eighteenth birthday, and his new navy-blue blazer from Brooks Brothers (“It makes you look like a handsome young doctor!” Enid hinted), and great stacks of white T-shirts and white jockey underpants and white long Johns, and a fifth-grade school picture of Denise in a Lucite frame, and the very same Hudson Bay blanket that Alfred had taken as a freshman to the University of Kansas four decades earlier, and a pair of leather-clad wool mittens that likewise dated from Alfred’s deep Kansan past, and a set of heavy-duty thermal curtains that Alfred had bought for him at Sears. Reading Chip’s college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence
New England winters can be very cold
. The curtains
he’d bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. “You’ll appreciate these on a cold night,” he told Chip. “You’ll be surprised how much they cut down drafts.” But Chip’s freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm arid let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted—to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particular brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn’t their fault that they didn’t belong in a dorm room. They’d betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out on the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he’d thought.

“I don’t understand these blankets,” Alfred said.

“All right,” Chip told Denise as he started up the stairs. “If it makes you feel better, I won’t pay you back.”

The question was: How to get out of this prison?

The big black lady, the mean one, the bastard, was the one
he had to keep an eye on. She intended to make his life a hell. She stood at the far end of the prison yard throwing him significant glances to remind him that she hadn’t forgotten him, she was still in hot pursuit of her vendetta. She was a lazy black bastard and he said so at a shout. He cursed the bastards, black and white, all around him. Goddamned sneaky bastards with their pinheaded regulations. EPA bureaucrats, OSHA functionaries, insolent so-and-sos. They were keeping their distance now, sure, because they knew he was onto them, but just let him nod off for one minute, just let him let his guard down, and watch what they would do to him. They could hardly wait to tell him he was nothing. They could hardly wait to show their disrespect. That fat black bastard, that nasty black bitch over there, held his eye and nodded across the white heads of the other prisoners:
I’m gonna get
you
. That’s what her nod said to him. And nobody else could see what she was doing to him. All the rest were timid useless strangers talking nonsense. He’d said hello to one of the fellows, asked him a simple question. The fellow didn’t even understand English. It ought to have been simple enough, ask a simple question, get a simple answer, but evidently not. He was on his own now, he was by himself in a corner; and the bastards were out to get him.

He didn’t understand where Chip was. Chip was an intellectual and had ways of talking sense to these people. Chip had done a good job yesterday, better than he could have done himself. Asked a simple question, got a simple answer, and then explained it in a way that a man could understand. But there was no sign of Chip now. Inmates semaphoring one another, waving their arms like traffic cops. Just try giving a simple order to these people, just try it. They pretended you didn’t exist. That fat bastard black woman had them all scared witless. If she figured out that the prisoners were on his side, if she found out they’d aided him in any way, she’d make them pay. Oh, she had that look. She had
that
I’m gonna make you hurt
look. And he, at this point in his life, he’d had just about enough of this insolent black type of woman, but what could you do? It was a prison. It was a public institution. They’d throw anybody in here. White-haired women semaphoring. Hairless fairies touching toes. But why
him
, for God’s sake? Why
him?
It made him weep to be thrown into a place like this. It was hell to get old even without being persecuted by that waddling black so-and-so.