The Corrections (64 page)

“Damn these lights!” he said.

“Al, what are you doing on the floor?”

“These goddamned cheap new lights!”

“Don’t
worry
about them. Just leave them. Let Gary and Jonah do that. Come upstairs and have lunch.”

The flight from Philadelphia was due in at one-thirty. Gary was going to rent a car and be at the house by three,
and Enid intended to let Alfred sleep in the meantime, because tonight she would have reinforcements. Tonight, if he got up and wandered, she wouldn’t be the only one on duty.

The quiet in the house after lunch was of such density that it nearly stopped the clocks. These final hours of waiting ought to have been the perfect time to write some Christmas cards, a win-win occasion in which either the minutes would fly by or she would get a lot of work done; but time could not be cheated in this way. Beginning a Short Note, she felt as if she were pushing her pen through molasses. She lost track of her words, wrote
took an unexpected “swim” in an
unexpected “swim,”
and had to throw the card away. She stood up to check the kitchen clock and found that five minutes had passed since she’d last checked. She arranged an assortment of cookies on a lacquered wooden holiday plate. She set a knife and a huge pear on a cutting board. She shook a carton of eggnog. She loaded the coffeemaker in case Gary wanted coffee. She sat down to write a Short Note and saw in the blank whiteness of the card a reflection of her mind. She went to the window and peered out at the bleached zoysia lawn. The mailman, struggling with holiday volumes, was coming up the walk with a mighty bundle that he pushed through the slot in three batches. She pounced on the mail and sorted wheat from chaff, but she was too distracted to open the cards. She went down to the blue chair in the basement.

“Al,” she shouted, “I think you should get up.”

He sat up haystack-haired and empty-eyed. “Are they here?”

“Any minute. Maybe you want to freshen up.”

“Who’s coming?”

“Gary and Jonah, unless Jonah’s too sick.”

“Gary,” Alfred said. “And Jonah.”

“Why don’t you take a
shower
?”

He shook his head. “No showers.”

“If you want to be stuck in that tub when they get here—”

“I think I’m entitled to a bath, after the work I’ve done.”

There was a nice shower stall in the downstairs bathroom, but Alfred had never liked to stand while bathing. Since Enid now refused to help him get out of the upstairs tub, he sometimes sat there for an hour, the water cold and soap-gray at his haunches, before he contrived to extricate himself, because he was so stubborn.

He had bathwater running in the upstairs bathroom when the long-awaited knock finally came.

Enid rushed to the front door and opened it to the vision of her handsome elder son alone on the front stoop. He was wearing his calfskin jacket and holding a carry-on suitcase and a paper shopping bag. Sunlight, low and polarized, had found a way around the clouds, as it often did near the end of a winter day. Flooding the street was the preposterous golden indoor light with which a minor painter might illuminate the parting of the Red Sea. The bricks of the Persons’ house, the blue and purple winter clouds, and the dark green resinous shrubs were all so falsely vivid as to be not even pretty but alien, foreboding.

“Where’s Jonah?” Enid cried.

Gary came inside and set his bags down. “He still has a fever.”

Enid accepted a kiss. Needing a moment to collect herself, she told Gary to bring his other suitcase in while he was at it.

“This is my only suitcase,” he informed her in a courtroom kind of voice.

She stared at the tiny bag. “That’s all you brought?”

“Look, I know you’re disappointed about Jonah—”

“How high was his fever?”

“A hundred this morning.”

“A hundred is not a high fever!”

Gary sighed and looked away, tilting his head to align it with the axis of the listing Christmas tree. “Look,” he said. “Jonah’s disappointed. I’m disappointed. You’re disappointed. Can we leave it at that? We’re all disappointed.”

“It’s just that I’m all ready for him,” Enid said. “I made his favorite dinner—”

“I specifically warned you—”

“I got tickets for Waindell Park tonight!”

Gary shook his head and walked toward the kitchen. “So we’ll go to the park,” he said. “And then tomorrow Denise is here.”

“Chip too!”

Gary laughed. “What, from Lithuania?”

“He called this morning.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Gary said.

The world in the windows looked less real than Enid would have liked. The spotlight of sunshine coming in under the ceiling of cloud was the dream light of no familiar hour of the day. She had an intimation that the family she’d tried to bring together was no longer the family she remembered—that this Christmas would be nothing at all like the Christmases of old. But she was doing her best to adjust to the new reality. She was suddenly
very
excited that Chip was coming. And since Jonah’s wrapped gifts would now be going to Philadelphia with Gary, she needed to wrap some travel alarm clocks and pen-and-pencil sets for Caleb and Aaron to reduce the contrast in her giving. She could do this while she waited for Denise and Chip.

“I have so many cookies,” she told Gary, who was washing his hands fastidiously at the kitchen sink. “I have a pear that I can slice, and some of that dark coffee that you kids like.”

Gary sniffed her dish towel before he dried his hands with it.

Alfred began to bellow her name from upstairs.

“Uch, Gary,” she said, “he’s stuck in the tub again. You go help him. I won’t do it anymore.”

Gary dried his hands extremely thoroughly. “Why isn’t he using the shower like we talked about?”

“He says he likes to sit down.”

“Well, tough luck,” Gary said. “This is a man whose gospel is taking responsibility for yourself.”

Alfred bellowed her name again.

“Go, Gary, help him,” she said.

Gary, with ominous calm, smoothed and straightened the folded dish towel on its rack. “Here are the ground rules, Mother,” he said in the courtroom voice. “Are you listening? These are the ground rules. For the next three days, I will do anything you want me to do, except deal with Dad in situations he shouldn’t be in. If he wants to climb a ladder and fall off, I’m going to let him lie on the ground. If he bleeds to death, he bleeds to death. If he can’t get out of the bathtub without my help, he’ll be spending Christmas in the bathtub. Have I made myself clear? Apart from that, I will do anything you want me to do. And then, on Christmas morning, you and he and I are going to sit down and have a talk—”

“
ENID
.” Alfred’s voice was amazingly loud. “
SOME
BODY’S AT THE DOOR!
”

Enid sighed heavily and went to the bottom of the stairs. “Al, it’s
Gary
.”

“Can you help me?” came the cry.

“Gary, go see what he wants.”

Gary stood in the dining room with folded arms. “Did I not make my ground rules clear?”

Enid was remembering things about her elder son which she liked to forget when he wasn’t around. She climbed the stairs slowly, trying to work a knot of pain out of her hip.

“Al,” she said, entering the bathroom, “I can’t help you out of the tub, you have to figure that out yourself.”

He was sitting in two inches of water with his arm extended and his fingers fluttering. “Get that,” he said.

“Get what?”

“That bottle.”

His bottle of Snowy Mane hair-whitening shampoo had fallen to the floor behind him. Enid knelt carefully on the bath mat, favoring her hip, and put the bottle in his hands. He massaged it vaguely, as though seeking purchase or struggling to remember how to open it. His legs were hairless, his hands spotted, but his shoulders were still strong.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, grinning at the bottle.

Whatever heat the water had begun with had dissipated in the December-cool room. There was a smell of Dial soap and, more faintly, old age. Enid had knelt in this exact spot thousands of times to wash her children’s hair and rinse their heads with hot water from a 1½-quart saucepan that she brought up from the kitchen for that purpose. She watched her husband turn the shampoo bottle over in his hands.

“Oh, Al,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

“Help me with this.”

“All right. I’ll help you.”

The doorbell rang.

“There it is again.”

“Gary,” Enid called, “see who that is.” She squeezed shampoo into her palm. “You’ve got to start taking showers instead.”

“Not steady enough on my feet.”

“Here, wet your hair.” She paddled a hand in the tepid water, to give Alfred the idea. He splashed some on his head. She could hear Gary talking to one of her friends, somebody female and chipper and St. Judean, Esther Root maybe.

“We can get a stool for the shower,” she said, lathering Alfred’s hair. “We can put a strong bar in there to hold on to, like Dr. Hedgpeth said we should. Maybe Gary can do that tomorrow.”

Alfred’s voice vibrated in his skull and on up through her fingers: “Gary and Jonah got in all right?”

“No, just Gary,” Enid said. “Jonah has a high, high fever and terrible vomiting. Poor kid, he’s much too sick to fly.”

Alfred winced in sympathy.

“Lean over now and I’ll rinse.”

If Alfred was trying to lean forward, it was evident only from a trembling in his legs, not from any change in his position.

“You need to do
much
more stretching,” Enid said. “Did you ever look at that sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth?”

Alfred shook his head. “Didn’t help.”

“Maybe Denise can teach you how to do those exercises. You might like that.”

She reached behind her for the water glass from the sink. She filled it and refilled it at the bathtub’s tap, pouring the hot water over her husband’s head. With his eyes squeezed shut he could have been a child.

“You’ll have to get yourself out now,” she said. “I won’t help you.”

“I have my own method,” he said.

Down in the living room Gary was kneeling to straighten the crooked tree.

“Who was at the door?” Enid said.

“Bea Meisner,” he said, not looking up. “There’s a gift on the mantel.”

“Bea Meisner?” A late flame of shame flickered in Enid. “I thought they were staying in Austria for the holiday.”

“No, they’re here for one day and then going to La Jolla.”

“That’s where Katie and Stew live. Did she bring anything?”

“On the mantel,” Gary said.

The gift from Bea was a festively wrapped bottle of something presumably Austrian.

“Anything else?” Enid said.

Gary, clapping fir needles from his hands, gave her a funny look. “Were you expecting something else?”

“No, no,” she said. “There was a silly little thing I asked her to get in Vienna, but I’m sure she forgot.”

Gary’s eyes narrowed. “What silly little thing?”

“Oh, nothing, just, nothing.” Enid examined the bottle to see if anything was attached to it. She’d survived her infatuation with Aslan, she’d done the work necessary to forget him, and she was by no means sure she wanted to see the Lion again. But the Lion still had power over her. She had a sensation from long ago, a pleasurable apprehension of a lover’s return. It made her miss how she used to miss Alfred.

She chided: “Why didn’t you invite her in?”

“Chuck was waiting in their Jaguar,” Gary said. “I gather they’re making the rounds.”

“Well.” Enid unwrapped the bottle—it was a Halb-Trocken Austrian champagne—to be sure there was no hidden package.

“That is an extremely sugary-looking wine,” Gary said.

She asked him to build a fire. She stood and marveled as her competent gray-haired son walked steadily to the woodpile, returned with a load of logs on one arm, deftly arranged them in the fireplace, and lit a match on the first try. The whole job took five minutes. Gary was doing nothing more than function the way a man was supposed to function, and yet, in contrast to the man Enid lived with, his capabilities seemed godlike. His least gesture was glorious to watch.

Along with her relief at having him in the house, though, came the awareness of how soon he would leave again.

Alfred, wearing a sport coat, stopped in the living room and visited with Gary for a minute before repairing to the den for a high-decibel dose of local news. His age and his stoop had taken two or three inches off his height, which not long ago had been the same as Gary’s.

While Gary, with exquisite motor control, hung the lights
on the tree, Enid sat by the fire and unpacked the liquor cartons in which she kept her ornaments. Everywhere she’d traveled she’d spent the bulk of her pocket money on ornaments. In her mind, while Gary hung them, she traveled back to a Sweden populated by straw reindeers and little red horses, to a Norway whose citizens wore authentic Lapp reindeer-skin boots, to a Venice where all the animals were made of glass, to a dollhouse Germany of enameled wood Santas and angels, to an Austria of wooden soldiers and tiny Alpine churches. In Belgium the doves of peace were made of chocolate and wrapped decoratively in foil, and in France the gendarme dolls and artiste dolls were impeccably dressed, and in Switzerland the bronze bells tinkled above overtly religious mini-crèches. Andalusia was atwitter with gaudy birds; Mexico jangled with its painted tin cutouts. On the high plateaux of China, the noiseless gallop of a herd of silk horses. In Japan, the Zen silence of its lacquered abstractions.

Gary hung each ornament as Enid directed. He was seeming different to her—calmer, more matoor, more deliberate—until she asked him to do a little job for her tomorrow.

“Installing a bar in the shower is not a ‘little job,’” he replied. “It would have made sense a year ago, but it doesn’t now. Dad can use the bathtub for another few days until we deal with this house.”

“It’s still four weeks before we fly to Philadelphia,” Enid said. “I want him to get in the habit of using the shower. I want you to buy a stool and put a bar in there tomorrow, so it’s done.”

Gary sighed. “Are you thinking you and Dad can actually stay in this house?”