Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  Bill said, “I got you. I was expecting to leave another message.”

  “I just walked in the door.”

  “Listen, I wanted to tell you because I’ve told everyone else. Except Susie, who’s in the air. Your Aunt Rose is not very well. She has pneumonia, and other complications I won’t go into. The hospital called just after you left. Jean is booking me a flight right now, I think the earliest leaves at something like six forty-five. Anyway, I wanted to let you know. She may be fine. On the other hand, she may not be. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone for. Over Christmas.”

  “Do you want me to come?” Paul said.

  “That’s sweet of you, son.”

  “I can come.”

  “You’ve got enough on your plate right here. Okay, there’s someone on the other line. Hold on a minute.”

  Paul waited, not thinking of anything much, and then his father’s voice returned—you could hear a faint shift even before his voice came through, indicating a different kind of access, like a key fitting and turning in a lock. “That was Nathan, I should get back to him, he’s trying to persuade me to let him book his driver. To pick me up from the airport, which I don’t need. Listen, have a good time, okay. Give yourself a break. Try and have a good time.”

  “Give Rose my love,” Paul said.

  But Bill still didn’t hang up—he wasn’t good at getting off the phone. “She was very proud of you,” he said at last. “Of all you kids. She took a real interest. Just the fact that, one of the Essingers, seeing you on TV. She loved watching you play.”

  “Okay, Dad, thanks for calling. I hope it’s all—I hope it’s fine. It’s good of you to go.”

  “Well, what can you do. All right,” Bill said, and then the phone went dead in Paul’s hands.

  Afterward, he clicked on the answering machine and heard his father’s voice again, more or less repeating himself, except of course that it had happened the other way around. “Listen, give me a call when you get in. I wanted to tell you because I’ve told the others …” At the end, Bill signed off with: “It was good to see you today. It’s nice to have Cal in the house. All right. Just call me when you get in. Dad.”

  Paul got up then poured himself a bowl of cereal, some kind of granola, and took the cold milk from the fridge—an industrial-sized unit, all stainless steel, which hummed audibly and was parked against the limestone wall. Nathan was very envious of this fridge. At least that’s what he said. “Well, it came with the house,” Paul told him. “I wouldn’t have picked it.”

  “You’re an idiot. This is a restaurant-quality fridge,” Nathan said. “What does that even mean?” Paul asked him. But sometimes when he opened the heavy door, he heard his brother’s voice. You’re an idiot, this is a restaurant-quality fridge … He took his bowl of cereal onto the patio porch, which meant setting it down on the concrete floor for a moment, unlocking and pulling the sliding door that separated his living room from the backyard. When you live alone you have to make these deliberate efforts to use different parts of the house. Outside, in the cool air, he slurped his cereal and drank up the sweet milk. The creek at the bottom of the property was really just a different kind of blackness, a sense of vague movement between the trees. Only at this time of year could you stand outside without getting bitten by mosquitoes.

  When Judith, Rose’s daughter, was thirteen years old, she flew to Texas on her own and visited them. It was a big deal for her, an only child, visiting her family of cousins. Getting on a plane for the first time by herself. None of the Essingers was particularly nice to her. Nathan was closest in age, but she got on all their nerves—complaining about the heat, about the air-conditioning, about the mosquitoes. Bill brought in bagels from Einstein’s bagels, to make her feel at home, and Judith said, “These don’t taste anything like New York bagels, I wonder why that is.” As if she were genuinely curious, that kind of thing. She was just a thirteen-year-old kid. Paul had a four-foot-long rubber rattle snake, which he put in her bed. Judith spent half an hour on the phone to her mother afterward, in tears. Saying, Nobody likes me, everybody’s mean. Paul overheard her, maybe she meant him to. The truth is, he was just a kid, too, they were all just kids. But every time he saw his Aunt Rose he felt … some residual … not guilt. A reminder of his father’s childhood. How far he had come. Bill had said to him before, given Rose’s general condition, at some point I expect to get a phone call, telling me … He spent his life in expectation, not of bad news exactly, but of the inevitable eventualities, so that when they came, he was ready for them, almost cheerful, he seemed prepared.

  SUNDAY

  Jean set the alarm on her phone for five a.m. so she could drive him to the airport. “It doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “With the jetlag, I’m awake anyway. This gives me something to do.” She put the phone in her bed, she slept with it next to her pillow, so that it didn’t wake Susie and the boys, who were getting in late the night before.

  When she came downstairs, Bill was lying on the couch in the TV room, with his shoes on, draped over the armrest so that he didn’t get the fabric dirty. “Okay,” he said, when Jean came in. “Okay,” repeating himself, still half-asleep. The TV was on, some movie.

  “Have you got everything?”

  His suitcase was in the front hall. The morning was windy and damp. When you’re tired, you feel the coldness more. Jean took his keys (they were driving the old Volvo), adjusted the seat and mirror, and turned on the heating. It was dark on the road and the lights of the other cars suggested a kind of conspiratorial intimacy. Under the low white sky, heavily overcast, the streetlamp glow didn’t get far. On Airport Boulevard, they passed a gas station, Dan’s Hamburgers, a tire-change place (While-U-Wait), and a church no bigger than a taco shack, with a sign like a drive-thru billboard sticking up in the parking lot (Salvation Is Cheap). There used to be a branch of Dan’s outside Jean’s high school, where the cool kids liked to go for lunch. Jean thought, they weren’t actually cool, this is just how you thought about people with friends, back in high school.

  Bill was awake in the passenger seat, looking out. Unshaved—his beard hadn’t been cut in several weeks, one of the things Liesel planned to get around to over the holiday, and he looked like a hippie rabbi or a student radical, except older and thinning on top. In his teaching jacket and button-up shirt, a real Seventies Jew. Which is probably why I always feel nostalgic watching old Dustin Hoffman movies. Tootsie, when he’s not in drag. Kramer vs. Kramer. Neither of my brothers looks like this, half-goys. It’s funny to be driving your father, one of those things that brings home to you, the relationship has changed.

  Jean said, “How bad is it? Did you talk to the doctors? Is that who called?”

  Since Henrik’s illness, she had acquired a capacity for absorbing and processing medical detail, in spite of her own low-level health anxieties, because this is something you have to do if you’re going to behave competently toward people you love in ways that benefit them. Bill started to explain. Rose’s thyroid issues were only part of the problem. The medication she was on affected her heart, she suffered from palpitations, she couldn’t sleep, which was another explanation for the weight gain. Also, maybe, for why she overate. When you’re tired and housebound, you spend all day putting food in your mouth. There’s only so much you can say. It doesn’t help that she’s borderline diabetic. Two weeks ago she fell at home getting off the pot—fell against the bathtub edge, and broke her hip. Just got dizzy. I’m so stupid, she said. She called me from the hospital. Just a stupid thing. One of the side effects of the thyroid medication is osteoporosis. Anyway, she broke her hip, and at her age, and weight, and given her general frailty, even routine operations have a certain level of associated risk. A hip replacement is no joke. But the doctors were satisfied, they kept her in for a week and let her go, a therapist came to the house to help her with the rehab, but the first day she came decided to take Rose right back in.

  Rose wasn’t making sense, she was badl
y dehydrated. When this woman took off the bandage to have a look, there was a rash, the whole area was infected, and since then they’ve been putting her through tests to find out what’s going on. Judith called me last night, she only found out yesterday afternoon. For some reason the hospital had her ex-husband’s cell phone number. One of the things you forget to do when you’re going through a divorce is change your details as next-of-kin on your mother’s medical records. It’s all a mess; Rose’s whole life is a mess. So for two days she’s been lying there unconscious with nobody to see her. Judith is arriving this afternoon. We get in around the same time; she’s made arrangements to leave the boy with his father. But all of these communications are painful for her, she doesn’t like asking him for help. I asked her, should I call Alex, or are you going to talk to him. Because somebody should probably tell him. So she says, can you. Judith is not a coper. Maybe that’s not fair, but she doesn’t make anything easier for herself. And this is her business, calling her father is really her business. So last night, at eleven o’clock, I phone Alex, who’s asleep in Tempe, with two small kids, and say to him, “I don’t expect you to do anything about this, but I thought you should know, your ex-wife may be about to die.”

  “What did he say?” Jean said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What did Alex say?”

  “He said what you’d expect him to say. Thank you for letting me know. If there’s anything I can do. I have no problem with Alex, we’ve always gotten along fine. I thought when Rose married him he’s a bit of … he’s not the kind of guy to appreciate her. But that was Rose’s fault, too. She was complicit. And by the time he walked out, well … You forget, you never knew her then, but your aunt was an extremely attractive woman, in her way. Very funny, too. She’s still very funny. When she’s not unconscious.”

  Jean pulled up outside the JetBlue check-in desk. There was a little podium outside, on the concourse. Even at six in the morning, taxis were arriving, the 10 mph zone was busy with trucks and cars. She had to wait to find a spot. Bill said, “Let me just get out here,” but Jean wanted to park and help him with the suitcase, she wanted to give him a hug. Then she sat in the driver’s seat and watched him walk through the sliding glass doors. She thought, he’s sixty-eight years old. The suitcase wheels, he has his ticket and passport inside the pocket of his sports jacket. He’ll be fine, she thought. He can look after himself. She remembered, when she was little, the way they used to travel to Europe every summer: with suitcases and boxes, always at the upper limit of what was allowable (Bill used to study the legal fine print), four kids in tow, everybody harassed, short-tempered, and basically cheerful. When Bill was her age he had a tenured job, a house, he was married with two kids. She pulled out into the slow traffic, it was still dark, and reversed her journey. The flat Texas landscape surrounded her, dawn was an hour away.

  When she got to the house, the lights were off, except for the upstairs bathroom where she had brushed her teeth an hour ago. A pale, slightly dingy, flowery blind over the bottom sash. The pyracantha hedge had gotten out of control, it reached in bunches almost to the second floor. An indicator of something, the way your parents, as they got older, let things go; but it was also a sign of growing privacy. When the kids leave home, the parents can retreat. She drove past the house and turned onto 32nd Street and then on to Guadalupe, which was relatively quiet at that hour, so she pulled across the median and started heading south. If you’re going to be up early, you may as well come back with breakfast.

  But the baker on Rio Grande looked closed. The street was just about a block and a half long, lampless, there were maybe a dozen houses, some old and poky, some new and big, with trees growing out of the front yards and getting tangled in the telephone wires. The kind of street where a kid could ride his bike. On the corner stood Texas French Bread, like a brick warehouse, with pleasant blue shutters fronting the sidewalk. But the windows in the bistro section were dark, and only at the back of the parking lot, where the bakery operated, could she see any signs of life. Well, it’s barely after six o’clock, almost lunchtime in England. Henrik was driving to Bristol to pick up the kids.

  This was his year to have Christmas with them—last year, which was right after everything went public, his wife took them home to her parents. But things were now proceeding on a more rational basis, with stuff like holiday time fairly parceled out. He had rented a cottage in Pembrokeshire; it was Jean who found it online, and then on Boxing Day he would fly to Austin, that was the deal. Are you nervous, she asked him. About meeting your parents? He shook his head. Maybe I will be. (He said this almost to be nice to her.) Who knows. For a minute she closed her eyes and when she woke up again it was a quarter to seven and somebody was cleaning tables in the front room. She got out of the car, in the cold, in the dark, and put her face to the window of the side entrance. Two tall stacks of dried wood lay in cages by the door. She tapped the glass and a young guy with a broom in his hand opened up.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’re closed. I haven’t even fired up the coffee machine.”

  “I don’t want coffee. Just something to take back home for breakfast.”

  “Well, let me see.”

  He had a well-trimmed beard and black glasses and wore a denim shirt. She thought he sounded Californian or Pacific Northwestern or something, which meant he didn’t sound like anything much. There was a tray behind the counter already stocked with scones and croissants, and Jean asked for several of each. While he was bagging them, she told him, “My mom says that during the French Revolution the first thing they did was ban morning bread. So that the bakers didn’t have to get up so early.” Her voice sounded strange to her, like she was reading from a book, not quite natural.

  “It’s quiet,” he said. “I don’t mind. I just kind of … do my thing.”

  By the time she pulled into the drive at Wheeler Street, the neighborhood trees had started to lighten, the sky was the color of concrete, birds made their noise, but sunrise was still half an hour away. Rose was dying, Henrik was coming in three days. Bill was probably already in the air. The bread was still warm in the bag as she walked up the porch steps and into the house. Everyone else was still asleep.

  * * *

  Dana woke up, a little after five, when Jean used the bathroom—the door was catty-corner to her bedroom door, the floorboards creaked, it was an old house. She lay in the strange room feeling strangely happy. Cal was still out cold. He barely fit in the crib anymore, his head and feet lay oddly angled, it seemed weird to her that Liesel put him in one. But who was she to pick fights. And she liked being in a house with other people in it, even if they were her sort-of ex in-laws. The apartment in New York felt very … just to go out for a newspaper or a carton of milk she had to take Cal with her. His bedtime was at seven-thirty; after that she was stuck.

  Last night, after checking on Cal, she waited for Paul to drive away. She thought, it might be easier when he’s gone. But in fact what she felt, after coming back down, was something else—a sense of intrusion. The phone rang, Jean picked up and then called for Bill, who was half-asleep on the couch, watching a basketball game. But he woke up quickly and started pacing with the handset. When one conversation ended, he dialed again. Liesel hovered in the background. He was speaking to Nathan, he was leaving messages, and when Dana looked for Jean to say good night, she found her in Liesel’s study, on the computer, booking flights. “His sister’s in the hospital,” Jean said, and Dana made appropriate noises. She said, “I’m going to go to bed, unless there’s something I can do,” and Jean said, “Go. You’ve had a long day,” but her attention and sympathy were elsewhere.

  When Dana crept into her room, Cal was snoring, breathing heavily through his mouth—his nose was still stuffed up. She changed in the dark and threw her clothes on an old leather club chair, which was out of keeping with the other chairs in the house, and probably belonged to Bill before he got married. The room was outside-temperature, mil
d for a New York winter, but freezing by indoor standards. The heating vents didn’t work properly; they were covered in cardboard boxes or rolled-up rugs or broken suitcases. Liesel had left a wool blanket in case Dana got cold, which itched a little when it touched her skin and smelled of mothballs. The whole room smelled of storage. And yet, and yet, as she lay in bed, tired but sleepless (first night syndrome, even though they’d had an early start), she felt the presence of accumulated life, which was missing in her own life, and had been missing through much of her childhood.

  Her mother was the kind of woman with one shelf of books (a few recent bestsellers, a dictionary, an atlas, and other than that, mostly cooking and travel books, a few museum catalogs). She didn’t like the clutter. The New York apartment in which Dana spent her first twelve years was rent-controlled, and when her dad got a job in D.C. they bought a newly built house in Bethesda, which was much too big for them. It had four bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, a separate dining room, a den, a living room, they never filled it. She never had any siblings. The kitchen floor was tiled marble, you had to take off your shoes, every footprint showed.

  And now she was in the middle of family messiness, urgency and intimacy and crisis, only it was someone else’s family. What am I doing here, she thought, staring into the dark, at the shape of the overhead fan against the wooden ceiling. It’s a little weird. Maybe what you’re trying to do is break up with them. Though that’s not what it felt like. And anyway, there’s Cal, they have a right to … Maybe it’s the opposite, maybe you’re just trying to bypass Paul. Who needs him. She had various explanations on the tip of her tongue, things she wanted to say to Liesel. Just because Paul and I … doesn’t mean … whatever happens. The cousins should get to know each other. I mean, it’s perfectly possible, the way things are going, that Cal isn’t going to have any brothers or sisters. And I know what that’s like.