Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  With thee to go,

  Is to stay here; without thee here to stay,

  Is to go hence unwilling …

  Paradise Lost

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  SATURDAY

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  TUESDAY

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY

  FRIDAY

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  SATURDAY

  “There are too many of us,” Liesel told her daughter, but it also gave her pleasure to be able to count them: “Fifteen, including Bill and me.” She had spent the morning getting the house ready for Christmas, washing sheets and towels, moving some of the boxes out of the spare room into the attic, to make space for the crib. Jean, her youngest, helped. She had flown in from London the day before and was up early with jet lag anyway, wild-haired, bright-eyed. You had to pull the attic ladder down with a hook. Liesel was too old to climb the foldout steps, but she watched and worried as Jean backed down the rungs.

  “I couldn’t do this on my own,” she said.

  And Jean said, “You don’t need to.” Afterward, she crouched on the floor in the “wooden” room (it used to belong to the au pair and sat over the old porte-cochere); she put the pieces of the crib together. She was a very competent person. I don’t know where she gets it from, not from me. Liesel stood in the doorway, useless. She had things to do but she hadn’t seen her daughter since August.

  “Isn’t Cal too old for this?” Jean asked. The floor was cluttered with large pieces of wood. Childless herself, she had learned to play the helpful aunt, to have opinions and secondhand expertise—otherwise you got excluded from the new family drama, the second act. “I mean, I’m happy to build it, but he’s four.”

  “It’s what he’s used to, I don’t know anymore. I want everything to be familiar.” When Liesel was tired or anxious, it came out as indecision. Her brown handsome face, under white hair, showed emotion easily.

  “It’s fine,” Jean said. “That way it’s there if he wants it.” When the crib was built, she stood up painfully; even her youngest wasn’t young anymore. “You know we all think you’re nuts.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Well, everybody but Paul. God knows what he thinks.”

  *

  Before Bill left for the office, Liesel reminded him that Cal and Dana’s flight was landing at noon. He was sitting at the kitchen table, scribbling; one end was covered with breakfast things, the other with pieces of paper.

  “I thought Jean wanted to pick them up.”

  “She said she could, but I told her not to bother. She went back to bed, she’s been up since three in the morning. I think she thinks …”

  “Why doesn’t Paul do it?” Bill asked, and Liesel gave him a look. Dana was Paul’s ex-girlfriend—Cal’s mother.

  “What do you have to do in the office? Nobody will be there.”

  “My secretary promised to leave me something … It’s too complicated, it’s not important,” Bill said. And then, giving in: “Do you want me to pick you up on the way?”

  Maybe he was nervous of meeting them on his own, for understandable reasons. Liesel would have collected them herself, but she never liked driving on the highway, even before the last few years of macular degeneration—it was like pressing a thumb to a screen, there were spots of blurriness, lines shifted and bent, telephone poles, street markings, it could be very disorienting. Even so, at the old airport, which was a fifteen-minute drive away, she might have done it, she was still perfectly legal. But Bergstrom felt too far.

  “Yes,” she said. “Okay. I think that would be good.”

  A few minutes later, the front door slammed and she watched him descend the portico steps and get in the car. Her study was on the other side of the living room; she could see him through the side windows, or rather his shape, between the leaves. When he walked he bent over, as if he were hurrying, even when there wasn’t any hurry. I need to cut his hair, she thought. His beard is getting out of control. Another thing to do before Christmas, and she felt rather than heard the old Volvo clank at the dip in the driveway, reversing. He backed into the road, turning slowly. The house was quiet now; she had a few hours.

  Liesel had semiretired from teaching and was working on a book—a sequel to her stories about growing up in Germany during the war. The trouble with her eyes gave all of this a greater sense of urgency. But even the capacity for urgency comes and goes as you get older. She spent most of her days at home, which made her a little stir-crazy, and she was often glad of excuses to get out of the house. Also, she worried about Dana. She was anxious about the visit and wanted to send the right signals from the start. And she wanted to see Cal again. She hadn’t seen him since the summer, when he spent a month with Paul in Wimberley, which was about fifty minutes from Austin in the car, although she didn’t feel comfortable driving there on her own anymore. Either Bill drove or Paul came to them.

  Her editor had made positive noises, but there was nothing under contract. And Liesel sometimes felt, as she chipped away at the computer, one finger at a time, that she was indulging in something, playing around. Keeping herself busy. All of which was fine by her.

  Sunshine streamed in, bright wintry Texas sunshine. You could feel it translating into heat against your skin, but Liesel also sat with a blanket on her lap. Her study was formed out of an old sleeping porch and got very cold. The screens had been turned into windows; it was like sitting in a glass box. From her desk, she could see the side of the garden by the kitchen extension (they built it after Bill got tenure). When they first moved to Austin, in the summer of 1975, she tried to grow vegetables there. The ground was so hard, she had to flood the earth, standing with the hose limp in her hand while mosquitoes chewed her, before she could get a shovel in. But nothing would grow, not even grass. And now ivy covered the dirt by the concrete footpath.

  Steps led down from her study into the yard, but her desk stood in the way and she never used them. Liesel was happy enough just looking out—along the bamboo hedge, past the pagoda (there were leftover sacks of fertilizer lying underneath it), and across the sharp-leaved St. Augustine’s lawn to the shack where they kept their gardening tools. It stood in the shade of an old pecan tree, which fruited every two years, and Bill had spent at least an hour yesterday combing the grass, trying to rake the nutshells out. She had watched him when she couldn’t think of anything to write. He wore his Cornell sweatshirt and a pair of dirty cords, what used to be his teaching pants. The acidity ruined the soil, he said. But also, every time the kids came home, Bill wanted the backyard to look like it used to look when they were kids.

  The woman they bought the house from told Liesel that her mother’s servant had lived in that little shack. (Her mother was dead. That’s why they were selling up.) A few years after the Essingers moved in, a man rang the bell and introduced himself. Sam Mosby—for some reason Liesel remembered his name. He said he used to visit his father in that house and wanted to look around again. At first Liesel thought, when she saw him through the door window, a young black man in chinos and a collared shirt, he’s trying to sell me something or maybe he wants a job. But he explained himself very naturally. He said the old lady used to give him licorice or pecan brittle every time he came over. Before leaving, he offered Liesel his card—he had recently started a painting business in East Austin.

  His father’s old cabin was really very small. You could hardly fit more than a single bed in there, one chest of drawers and a hard chair. She wondered if as a boy he ever slept over.

  One of the first things the Essingers contracted for was to fi
x the roof—Liesel had an idea that the kids could use the cabin as a playhouse. A long limb of the pecan tree rested its weight on the shingles and had to be cut down. The foundation needed work, too, and the contractor found a nest of copperheads nearby, under the roots of a eucalyptus. Mr. Mosby must have lived with them for years.

  These are the stories she wanted to write about now. A young German woman, raised during the Second World War, making a life for herself in America, the land of plenty. Arriving first at Cornell, on a Fulbright, where she met Bill and got married—to a Jew. Then trailing after him for several years on the academic roadshow, renting houses, looking for joint appointments, before moving to Texas with three small kids and finding … the kind of thing you read about the South in books. A black servant who sleeps in the shed. The house itself was a 1920s plantation-style colonial, with white clapboard walls, blue-shuttered windows, pillars holding up the roof to the veranda. You learn to live with the sense of estrangement. Because even the weather can seem like a stranger to you, the heat, the sudden storms (flash floods they call them), and the days like this in late December, when the sun is out, the sky is clear of clouds, and it might be spring in northern Germany, except for the leafless trees.

  Probably Liesel was as old now as that woman when she died. When you start out somewhere you have no intention of ending up there, too. Maybe that’s not right. Intention doesn’t come into it. But you can’t imagine … that’s not right either. You spend your life imagining. From the first you think, in thirty years, will I sound different, what will my children be like … my Texan Jewish children. When Liesel told her mother about Sam Mosby, and the nest of copperheads, about trying to grow potatoes in the hard ground, and the grass so sharp it almost hurt to walk barefoot on it, her mother said, I don’t think any of this was written into your stars at birth. But already Liesel felt inside her a little resistance to her mother’s sympathy. This is my home, she wanted to say. She had made her own life. And took a certain pride in pronouncing all the German names like everyone else: Mueller like Miller, Koenig like Keenig. Her mother probably felt what she was supposed to feel, gently pushed away.

  Whatever you did to your parents your kids do to you. Liesel knew she was in the middle of an ongoing argument with Paul, the kind of argument where you don’t have to say anything. Because she couldn’t tell him what she felt, almost ashamed, though maybe that wasn’t the right way of putting it. The kind of unhappiness you don’t want to look at or admit to. The idea that one of her children would walk out on his family … was unspeakably … but then again, she didn’t have to say anything, because Paul knew what she felt about it anyway. You don’t have to say anything and still they blame you for it, they get mad at you. Just for having a point of view. Jean told her, it’s not enough not to say anything, you have to stop thinking it, too. But how do you stop thinking something. Jean said, you stop.

  But it’s not even true that Paul was mad at her. He rarely mentioned any of the legal problems or stages or decisions. Around his parents he always sounded careful and considerate, almost polite, which wasn’t easy to keep up, for any of them. They saw him maybe once a week. More when he had Cal. But how can you say to someone, “You don’t seem happy to me,” without its sounding like a reproach? So she said it to Bill instead. If you want to walk out on your marriage, she said, okay, I don’t like it. But you have to walk into something, I’d almost rather he was having an affair. Instead of … whatever he’s doing. Buying that concrete box in Wimberley. Outside Wimberley. I don’t understand what he does with himself all day. I really can’t imagine. There’s nothing for him there, he’s just running away. And hiding.

  Bill, who was just as unhappy about all this as she was, couldn’t help correcting her. They had a disagreement, he said, about certain life choices. “He wasn’t running away, it’s just that Dana didn’t want to come along. He didn’t want the life they had in New York, which I can understand.”

  It was Liesel in the end who kept up contact with Dana, and not just for Cal’s sake. She had a slightly embarrassed feeling that Dana herself wanted to stay in touch. Embarrassed because, Liesel also felt, if it comes to sides, I know whose side I’m on. But it didn’t come to sides. Mostly they emailed each other, Dana sent pictures of Cal. It was Dana who told her, Paul’s going to see him at New Year, he’s coming to New York. Liesel got the sense that these visits were fraught for all of them. Confusing, too; it was a small apartment. And so she eventually wrote, Why don’t you come for Christmas. That way, Paul can see Cal here, but there’s no other pressure—you can stay with us. He lives fifty minutes away in the car, you can see as much of each other or as little as you want. And Cal can spend time with his cousins, there will be kids around.

  For the first time, Paul blew up at her. “You’re interfering,” he said. “This is none of your business.”

  “No, it isn’t. You’re right.” She also thought, Jean never gives me credit for biting my tongue. But I’m biting my tongue now.

  “Every time we make an arrangement, there are negotiations, and every time we change an arrangement, we have to have more negotiations.”

  “There’s nothing to change …”

  “How long is Dana going to stay?”

  “I don’t know … a week. She says she wants to be home for New Year.”

  “I was supposed to have Cal for New Year.”

  “So he can stay for New Year, too.”

  “Without Dana?”

  Liesel hesitated. “She can leave him here.”

  Paul shook his head, almost amused. “If she leaves him here, I have to fly him back.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you thought any of this through.”

  “Maybe I didn’t,” she said.

  “You should have asked me first.”

  “I should have asked you.” And then she gave the real reason, which was also the honest truth. “I didn’t think she would say yes.”

  *

  Liesel seemed to find out about their separation, if that’s what it was, by stages. Paul never exactly told her anything; maybe he was ashamed, too. He obviously talked to the other kids, to Nathan, his big brother, about the legal and financial details, but there were things no one passed on to Liesel or Bill. Whatever went wrong started at the US Open. Her first reaction, when Paul lost to that guy (she couldn’t remember his name), was, well, at least that’s over. This is what she said to him afterward, when he met them in the players’ lounge, still wet from the showers.

  “You’ve done much better than anybody thought. I’m proud of you, I still can’t believe it. My tennis-playing son.”

  Paul patted her on the head. There was a wide window overlooking one of the courts, with a match in progress, crowds filling the bleachers, an umpire, ball boys, the whole back and forth. He wasn’t paying attention to what she said.

  But Jean took her to task for it later on. She was standing up for her brother in some funny way. “That’s not strictly true,” she said. “Maybe he did better than you thought he would.”

  “Das stimmt gar nicht. I always …” Somehow, Liesel had to defend herself on the long unhappy train ride back to Manhattan. Paul had offered to drive some people in his car, but in the end only Cal and Dana rode with him. There was a kind of deference shown, which Jean later felt bad about. Maybe she felt bad already, abandoning her brother like that (Like what? Liesel thought—to his family?), and this is why she picked a fight with her mother. Who knows. They had one of those stupid arguments. Liesel had to justify her … level of expectation for her children. “It’s not that I don’t think the world of you. Of all of you. Of course I do. But I don’t care about these … stupid … measures of success.”

  “You have to realize,” Jean said, “that these are the measures of success that matter to us. This is what Paul cares about. You can’t understand what’s going on here if you don’t accept that.”

  The fact is, whenever Liesel used to watch him play, sh
e felt almost unbearably tense. Tense and bored and somehow sorry for him. That he wanted to win so much. But after it was over, she could never remember anything. The name of his opponent, the final score. Paul would talk about this point or that point, and everybody seemed to know what he was talking about. Even Susie, his other sister, who otherwise had no interest in sports. But afterward, none of it mattered to Liesel, she was just glad it was over. And now the whole thing was over. She wanted to show him some sympathy, some of which she felt, but mostly what she felt was relief. Now you can get on with your life.

  Bill, of course, kept pestering Paul to postpone whatever decision he was going to make until his head had cleared. “That’s a long time to be retired.”

  “My head is clear,” Paul told him.

  He flew out to Austin and stayed with them for several days. Just to finish up the paperwork on this house he was buying near Wimberley. Also, he wanted to take a contractor around. The house was only ten years old, one of these modernist boxes, all glass and concrete, which had lately become fashionable in Austin. But the trouble with minimalism is that it puts a lot of pressure on the quality of craftsmanship, because everything stands out—any asymmetry or loose wires or leaks or rust. The property ran down to the Blanco River. The boathouse needed work, too, and not just a lick of paint.

  Liesel asked him, “How’s Dana doing? How’s Cal?” But he only said, “Inez is around, she’s got help.”

  By this point, she was deep in the middle of teaching—her last full year. She was going through her own retirement doubts. Maybe she didn’t pay enough attention. She also thought, he probably wants to be left alone. And they had a nice time together. They went out to restaurants, the restaurants he used to love as a kid, Fonda San Miguel, lantern-lit, with bright tiled floors and potted trees inside. Ruby’s BBQ, just behind their house on 29th Street—you could smell the smoker from their backyard. He let himself eat whatever he wanted to. In the evenings, he sat with Bill and watched baseball on TV. Paul was never their most communicative child. He was always very level. He went jogging in the mornings to stay in shape. He made decisions about the house. He spent a certain amount of time on his computer. And then after a week he returned to New York.