“That is the essence of my philosophy, yes.”
“Well, it ain’t mine,” Gary said.
“I’m aware of that. And that’s why we will spend forty-eight hours and no more.”
Gary hung up angrier than ever. He’d hoped his parents would stay for an entire week in October. He’d wanted them to eat pie in Lancaster County, see a production at the Annenberg Center, drive in the Poconos, pick apples in West Chester, hear Aaron play the trumpet, watch Caleb play soccer, take delight in Jonah’s company, and generally see how good Gary’s life was, how worthy of their admiration and respect; and forty-eight hours was not enough time.
He left his study and kissed Jonah good night. Then he took a shower and lay down on the big oaken bed and tried to interest himself in the latest Inc. But he couldn’t stop arguing with Alfred in his head.
During his visit home in March he’d been appalled by how much his father had deteriorated in the few weeks since Christmas. Alfred seemed forever on the verge of derailing as he lurched down hallways or half slid down stairs or wolfed at a sandwich from which lettuce and meat loaf rained; checking his watch incessantly, his eyes wandering whenever a conversation didn’t engage him directly, the old iron horse was careering toward a crash, and Gary could hardly stand to look. Because who else, if not Gary, was going to take responsibility? Enid was hysterical and moralizing, Denise lived in a fantasyland, and Chip hadn’t been to St. Jude in three years. Who else but Gary was going to say: This train should not be running on these tracks?
The first order of business, as Gary saw it, was to sell the house. Get top dollar for it, move his parents into someplace smaller, newer, safer, cheaper, and invest the difference aggressively. The house was Enid and Alfred’s only large asset, and Gary took a morning to inspect the whole property slowly, inside and out. He found cracks in the grouting, rust lines in the bathroom sinks, and a softness in the master bedroom ceiling. He noticed rain stains on the inner wall of the back porch, a beard of dried suds on the chin of the old dishwasher, an alarming thump in the forced-air blower, pustules and ridges in the driveway’s asphalt, termites in the woodpile, a Damoclean oak limb dangling above a dormer, finger-wide cracks in the foundation, retaining walls that listed, whitecaps of peeling paint on window jambs, big emboldened spiders in the basement, fields of dried sow bug and cricket husks, unfamiliar fungal and enteric smells, everywhere he looked the sag of entropy. Even in a rising market, the house was beginning to lose value, and Gary thought: We’ve got to sell this fucker now, we can’t lose another day.
On the last morning of his visit, while Jonah helped Enid bake a birthday cake, Gary took Alfred to the hardware store. As soon as they were on the road, Gary said it was time to put the house on the market.
Alfred, in the passenger seat of the gerontic Olds, stared straight ahead. “Why?”
“If you miss the spring season,” Gary said, “you’ll have to wait another year. And you can’t afford another year. You can’t count on good health, and the house is losing value.”
Alfred shook his head. “I’ve agitated for a long time. One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need. Somewhere your mother can cook and we have a place to sit. But it’s no use. She doesn’t want to leave.”
“Dad, if you don’t put yourself someplace manageable, you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re going to wind up in a nursing home.”
“I have no intention of going to a nursing home. So.”
“Just because you don’t intend to doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
Alfred looked, in passing, at Gary’s old elementary school. “Where are we going?”
“You fall down the stairs, you slip on the ice and break your hip, you’re going to end up in a nursing home. Caroline’s grandmother—”
“I didn’t hear where we were going.”
“We’re going to the hardware store,” Gary said. “Mom wants a dimmer switch for the kitchen.”
Alfred shook his head. “She and her romantic lighting.”
“She gets pleasure from it,” Gary said. “What do you get pleasure from?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve just about worn her out.”
Alfred’s active hands, on his lap, were gathering nothing—raking in a poker pot that did not exist. “I’ll ask you again not to meddle,” he said.
The midmorning light of a late-winter thaw, the stillness of a weekday nonhour in St. Jude, Gary wondered how his parents stood it. The oak trees were the same oily black as the crows perching in them. The sky was the same color as the salt-white pavement on which elderly St. Judean drivers obeying barbiturate speed limits were crawling to their destinations: to malls with pools of meltwater on their papered roofs, to the arterial that overlooked puddled steel yards and the state mental hospital and transmission towers feeding soaps and game shows to the ether; to the beltways and, beyond them, to a million acres of thawing hinterland where pickups were axle-deep in clay and .22s were fired in the woods and only gospel and pedal steel guitars were on the radio; to residential blocks with the same pallid glare in every window, besquirreled yellow lawns with a random plastic toy or two embedded in the dirt, a mailman whistling something Celtic and slamming mailboxes harder than he had to, because the deadness of these streets, at such a nonhour, in such a nonseason, could honestly kill you.
“Are you happy with your life?” Gary said, waiting for a left-turn arrow. “Can you say you’re ever happy?”
“Gary, I have an affliction—”
“A lot of people have afflictions. If that’s your excuse, fine, if you want to feel sorry for yourself, fine, but why drag Mom down?”
“Well. You’ll be leaving tomorrow.”
“Meaning what,” Gary said. “That you’ll sit in your chair and Mom will cook and clean for you?”
“There are things in life that simply have to be endured.”
“Why bother staying alive, if that’s your attitude? What do you have to look forward to?”
“I ask myself that question every day.”
“Well, and what’s your answer?” Gary said.
“What’s your answer? What do you think I should look forward to?”
“Travel.”
“I’ve traveled enough. I spent thirty years traveling.”
“Time with family. Time with people you love.”
“No comment.”
“What do you mean, ‘no comment’?”
“Just that: no comment.”
“You’re still sore about Christmas.”
“You may interpret it however you like.”
“If you’re sore about Christmas, you might have the consideration to say so—”
“No comment.”
“Instead of insinuating.”
“We should have come two days later and left two days earlier,” Alfred said. “That’s all I have to say on the topic of Christmas. We should have stayed forty-eight hours.”
“It’s because you’re depressed, Dad. You are clinically depressed—”
“And so are you.”
“And the responsible thing would be to get some treatment.”
“Did you hear me? I said so are you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Figure it out.”
“Dad, really, no, what are you talking about? I’m not the one who sits in a chair all day and sleeps.”
“Underneath, you are,” Alfred pronounced.
“That’s simply false.”
“One day you will see.”
“I will not!” Gary said. “My life is on a fundamentally different basis than yours.”
“Mark my words. I look at your marriage, I see what I see. Someday you’ll see it, too.”
“That’s empty talk and you know it. You’re just pissed off with me, and you have no way to deal with it.”
“I’ve told you I don’t want to discuss this.”
“And I have no respect for that.”
“Wel
l, there are things in your life that I have no respect for either.”
It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that Alfred, who was wrong about almost everything, did not respect things in Gary’s life; and yet it did hurt.
At the hardware store he let Alfred pay for the dimmer switch. The old man’s careful plucking of bills from his slender wallet and his faint hesitation before he offered them were signs of his respect for a dollar—of his maddening belief that each one mattered.
Back at the house, while Gary and Jonah kicked a soccer ball, Alfred gathered tools and killed the power to the kitchen and set about installing the dimmer. Even at this late date it didn’t occur to Gary not to let Alfred handle wiring. But when he came inside for lunch he found that his father had done no more than remove the old switch plate. He was holding the dimmer switch like a detonator that made him shake with fear.
“My affliction makes this difficult,” he explained.
“You’ve got to sell this house,” Gary said.
After lunch he took his mother and his son to the St. Jude Museum of Transport. While Jonah climbed into old locomotives and toured the dry-docked submarine and Enid sat and nursed her sore hip, Gary compiled a mental list of the museum’s exhibits, hoping the list would give him a feeling of accomplishment. He couldn’t deal with the exhibits themselves, their exhausting informativeness, their cheerful prose-for-the-masses. THE GOLDEN AGE OF STEAM POWER. THE DAWN OF FLIGHT. A CENTURY OF AUTOMOTIVE SAFETY. Block after block of taxing text. What Gary hated most about the Midwest was how unpampered and unprivileged he felt in it. St. Jude in its optimistic egalitarianism consistently failed to accord him the respect to which his gifts and attainments entitled him. Oh, the sadness of this place! The earnest St. Judean rubes all around him seemed curious and undepressed. Happily filling their misshapen heads with facts. As if facts were going to save them! Not one woman half as pretty or as well dressed as Caroline. Not one other man with a decent haircut or an abdomen as flat as Gary’s. But, like Alfred, like Enid, they were all extremely deferential. They didn’t jostle Gary or cut in front of him but waited until he’d drifted to the next exhibit. Then they gathered round and read and learned. God, he hated the Midwest! He could hardly breathe or hold his head up. He thought he might be getting sick. He took refuge in the museum’s gift shop and bought a silver belt buckle, two engravings of old Midland Pacific trestles, and a pewter hip flask (all for himself), a deerskin wallet (for Aaron), and a CD-ROM Civil War game (for Caleb).
“Dad,” Jonah said, “Grandma says she’ll buy me two books that cost less than ten dollars each or one book for less than twenty dollars, is that OK?”
Enid and Jonah were a lovefest. Enid had always preferred little kids to big kids, and Jonah’s adaptive niche in the family ecosystem was to be the perfect grandchild, eager to scramble up on laps, unafraid of bitter vegetables, under-excited by television and computer games, and skilled at cheerfully answering questions like “Are you loving school?” In St. Jude he was luxuriating in the undivided attention of three adults. He declared St. Jude the nicest place he’d ever been. From the back seat of the Oldfolksmobile, his elfin eyes wide, he marveled at everything Enid showed him.
“It’s so easy to park here!
“No traffic!
“The Transport Museum is better than any museums we have, Dad, don’t you agree?
“I love the legroom in this car. I think this is the nicest car I’ve ever ridden in.
“All the stores are so close and handy!”
That night, after they’d returned from the museum and Gary had gone out and done more shopping, Enid served stuffed pork chops and a chocolate birthday cake. Jonah was dreamily eating ice cream when she asked him if he might like to come and have Christmas in St. Jude.
“I would love that,” Jonah said, his eyelids drooping with satiety.
“You could have sugar cookies, and eggnog, and help us decorate the tree,” Enid said. “It’ll probably snow, so you can go sledding. And, Jonah, there’s a wonderful light show every year at Waindell Park, it’s called Christmasland, they have the whole park lit up—”
“Mother, it’s March,” Gary said.
“Can we come at Christmas?” Jonah asked him.
“We’ll come again very soon,” Gary said. “I don’t know about Christmas.”
“I think Jonah would love it,” Enid said.
“I would completely love it,” Jonah said, hoisting another spoonload of ice cream. “I think it might turn out to be the best Christmas I ever had.”
“I think so, too,” Enid said.
“It’s March,” Gary said. “We don’t talk about Christmas in March. Remember? We don’t talk about it in June or August, either. Remember?”
“Well,” Alfred said, standing up from the table. “I am going to bed.”
“St. Jude gets my vote for Christmas,” Jonah said.
Enlisting Jonah directly in her campaign, exploiting a little boy for leverage, seemed to Gary a low trick on Enid’s part. After he’d put Jonah to bed, he told his mother that Christmas ought to be the last of her worries.
“Dad can’t even install a light switch,” he said. “And now you’ve got a leak upstairs, you’ve got water coming in around the chimney—”
“I love this house,” Enid said from the kitchen sink, where she was scrubbing the pork-chop pan. “Dad just needs to work a little on his attitude.”
“He needs shock treatments or medication,” Gary said. “And if you want to dedicate your life to being his servant, that’s your choice. If you want to live in an old house with a lot of problems, and try to keep everything just the way you like it, that’s fine, too. If you want to wear yourself out trying to do both, be my guest. Just don’t ask me to make Christmas plans in March so you can feel OK about it all.”
Enid upended the pork-chop pan on the counter beside the overloaded drainer. Gary knew he ought to pick up a towel, but the jumble of wet pans and platters and utensils from his birthday dinner made him weary; to dry them seemed a task as Sisyphean as to repair the things wrong with his parents’ house. The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.
He poured a smallish brandy nightcap while Enid, with unhappy stabbing motions, scraped waterlogged food scraps from the bottom of the sink.
“What do you think I should do?” she said.
“Sell the house,” Gary said. “Call a realtor tomorrow.”
“And move into some cramped, modern condominium?” Enid shook the repulsive wet scraps from her hand into the trash. “When I have to go out for the day, Dave and Mary Beth invite Dad over for lunch. He loves that, and I feel so comfortable knowing he’s with them. Last fall he was out planting a new yew, and he couldn’t get the old stump out, and Joe Person came over with a pickax and the two of them worked all afternoon together.”
“He shouldn’t be planting yews,” Gary said, regretting already the smallness of his initial pour. “He shouldn’t be using a pickax. The man can hardly stand up.”
“Gary, I know we can’t be here forever. But I want to have one last really nice family Christmas here. And I want—”
“Would you consider moving if we had that Christmas?”
New hope sweetened Enid’s expression. “Would you and Caroline consider coming?”
“I can’t make any promises,” Gary said. “But if you’d feel more comfortable about putting the house on the market, we would certainly consider—”
“I would adore it if you came. Adore it.”
“Mother, though, you have to be realistic.”
“Let’s get through this year,” Enid said, “let’s think about having Christmas here, like Jonah wants, and then we’ll see!”
Gary’s anhedonia had worsened when he returned to Chestnut Hill. As a winter project, he’d been distilling hundreds of hours of home videos into a watchable two-hour Greatest Lambert Hits compilation that he could make quality copies of and maybe send out as a “video Christmas card.” I
n the final edit, as he repeatedly reviewed his favorite family scenes and re-cued his favorite songs (“Wild Horses,” “Time After Time,” etc.), he began to hate these scenes and hate these songs. And when, in the new darkroom, he turned his attention to the All-Time Lambert Two Hundred, he found that he no longer enjoyed looking at still photographs, either. For years he’d mentally tinkered with the All-Time Two Hundred, as with an ideally balanced mutual fund, listing with great satisfaction the images that he was sure belonged in it. Now he wondered whom, besides himself, he was trying to impress with these pictures. Whom was he trying to persuade, and of what? He had a weird impulse to burn his old favorites. But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting anhedonia, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun …
He came awake with an itching hard-on and Caroline beside him in the sheets.
His nightstand light was still burning, but otherwise the room was dark. Caroline lay in sarcophagal posture, her back flat on the mattress and a pillow beneath her knees. Through the screens on the bedroom windows came seeping the coolish, humid air of a summer grown tired. No wind stirred the leaves of the sycamore whose lowest branches hung outside the windows.
On Caroline’s nightstand was a hardcover copy of Middle Ground: How to Spare Your Child the Adolescence YOU Had (Caren Tamkin, Ph.D., 1998).
She seemed to be asleep. Her long arm, kept flabless by thrice-weekly swims at the Cricket Club, rested at her side. Gary gazed at her little nose, her wide red mouth, the blond down and the dull sheen of sweat on her upper lip, the tapering strip of exposed blond skin between the hem of her T-shirt and the elastic of her old Swarthmore College gym shorts. Her nearer breast pushed out against the inside of the T-shirt, the carmine definition of its nipple faintly visible through the fabric’s stretched weave …
When he reached out and smoothed her hair, her entire body jerked as if the hand were a defibrillator paddle.