Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  *

  David woke Susie when he came into the room, trying to find his way in the dark. He often stayed up after she went to sleep, and he’d been sitting with the kids, messing around online, while they … but she said, “What time is it?” and he said, “A little after one o’clock.” “You woke me up,” she said, and then, because she was only now waking up (saying it made it so), asked him if Ben had gone to bed yet. “Not yet,” David told her, taking off his clothes and leaving them on the floor, before he climbed in next to her—his hands and feet were cold, and he tried to warm them on her until she pushed him off. “I’ve had an idea for a book,” she said.

  TUESDAY

  The reason Bill didn’t call was that he decided to take Judith to the movies. He figured she could use a break, but the next morning, Christmas Day, he phoned Wheeler Street and told Liesel the plot. Judith wanted to see This Is 40, because who am I kidding, right, I’m practically the target audience, although she’s only thirty-eight. Bill, somewhat to his surprise, liked the movie, even though they exaggerated certain elements for comic effect. For example, it didn’t seem plausible to him that the husband, I can’t remember the actor’s name, but I believe he’s Jewish, would have lied to his wife about playing fantasy baseball. But much of it was also well observed.

  They went to the Showcase Cinema in Ridge Hill, which meant getting in the car. By this point most of the roads had been successfully cleared, certainly the avenues and highways, but they were almost late for the previews because … because he couldn’t get the damn thing to start. The rental had one of these keys without a key, one of these keys you just have to press a button, and then you—I don’t know where you put it, Judith says you can just put it in your pocket—but he couldn’t figure out how to turn the engine on. You just turn it on, she said. They sat there in the cold (because of course without the engine running he couldn’t turn the heating on; the windshield was starting to fog up) pressing buttons while nothing happened. He put his foot on the brake, he took it off again, he shifted gears, and none of it made the least bit of difference, until Judith said let me try, so he got out of the car and she got into the driver’s seat and sat down. And for her it started. She doesn’t know why, but she didn’t want to drive so left it in neutral and I got out again and she got out and then we both got back in.

  But she was very—she was very good-natured about it, and Bill, talking to Liesel, remembered letting himself go on the drive to Ridge Hill, complaining about the fucking car, what’s wrong with a key you can stick in the ignition, but Judith somehow let it wash over her and by the end … Of course, what really pissed him off wasn’t the car, it was his sister lying there in the hospital bed, connected to tubes, breathing through a ventilator, it was listening to Judith all day, and then driving out to Ridge Hill on Christmas Eve to watch a movie, but by the end … The fact is, he had a good time, Judith was tolerant company and very interested in small things. She said, I’m telling you what you already know, Uncle Bill, it’s a generation thing. I’m basically on your side, but I see the way Mikey is growing up. They call them digital natives, if you leave him alone on the computer for five minutes … I mean, he’s six years old but afterward you have to ask him to unblock or … and she was off again, boasting but also exposing herself, which is really the same thing, while he paid attention to the road and let the traffic overtake him, because on a cold night, after a sunny day, after snowfall, you have to watch out for black ice.

  What you realize, what he had forgotten … but after a few days of spending really whole days with Judith … there are certain people you need to be continuously present in their lives to understand why they are interesting and sympathetic, because their opportunities for self-expression are made up entirely of local and daily problems and their solutions, and you can’t understand what matters to them without involving yourself completely … while Liesel, listening, heard also in Bill’s voice the deeper presence of his family. His mother, for example, who always asked for recipes at every meal, even if she didn’t like the food, because she had been taught that asking for recipes was polite—a cultured and well-mannered thing to do. It showed an interest in your hosts, though she was tone-deaf to any attempt at changing the conversation and would force you to explain from scratch, and repeat yourself if she didn’t understand … so that discussions about the food could take up most of the meal, and you never had to talk about anything else, politics, culture, art, because they might cause disagreement, which she considered inappropriate.

  Afterward, would you believe it, Bill said, the whole thing happened again. It must have been five minutes they sat in the cold car at the Cineplex parking lot while he fiddled with whatever there was to fiddle with until the damn thing finally kicked into life. From where he was sitting, in Rose’s front parlor, he could see the snow piled up by the side of the road against the chain-link fence of the park opposite her house, still white, still clean in the drifts. Judith was still sleeping, it was half past eight in the morning, and the skies were overcast today. Low clouds seemed to hang over the baseball field not much higher than the trees. Well, he said, this is paradise if you like this kind of thing, and Liesel said, “How’s Rose?”

  Last night they kicked us out after dinner, but she was … measurably better, he said. She was somebody you could recognize, I mean, as herself. She was conscious, she talked (when they unhooked the ventilator) and sat up in bed, she asked me to watch whatever I wanted to watch, sports, it didn’t matter, she couldn’t concentrate anyway. So I turned on one of the Bowl Games. But we also had a conversation about what was happening to her, she knew where she was, she had some awareness of the sequence of events that had … at least, she remembered breaking her hip and going into surgery, where they put her under, she remembers coming home again though after that … everything else has been wiped clean. But she was capable of surprise, that seemed to me a good sign, that she’s taking on information. They’re pumping her full of steroids, which make you hungry, and she asked last night for a little ice cream, so Judith, she can’t help herself, she has to step in … because Rose is borderline diabetic, and the steroids … but I don’t think it would have mattered. For some reason the diabetic ice cream the hospital serves is Cherry Garcia, which Rose doesn’t like. But they brought it to her anyway, and she picked at it with her spoon, until Judith reacted. She said you’re worse than Mikey. This is how they interact.

  The doctor says he’s satisfied, Bill said. It’s good to see her breathing on her own. Though after we left, they put the mask on again. I guess we’ll both go back when Judith wakes up.

  I don’t know when I’m coming home. How was Christmas?

  Already it surprised him, how distant he felt from scenes in Texas, and Liesel, hearing it in his voice, decided not to say anything about Paul. Do you want me to go to the Kirkendolls’ party, she asked? Maybe, without knowing why, trying to involve him again in their daily lives. Judge Kirkendoll used to be one of his colleagues at the university, and every year on Boxing Day he threw a party. Bill and he had a peculiar relationship. Years ago Bill loaned him a significant amount of money to buy a piece of ranchland outside Brenham. This was before the judge got married, when he was still a young academic. Ever since then, on the basis of that money, some kind of deeper trust had evolved, even though, in other respects, their personalities offered few points of contact. Kirkendoll came from an old Texas military family. His father was a famous senator, who dropped out of West Point to become a teacher, and later a lawyer, before turning to government. He did a lot for liberal causes when the Southern block still voted Democratic and was the only Texan in either House to support the Civil Rights Act in 1964. A complicated but basically honorable figure. And Kirk (as everybody called him) had the manner of someone who knew people and kept secrets.

  His wife was the granddaughter of Jimmy Bayreuth, the construction millionaire—one of the men who could reasonably claim to have built Texas, including the Miller D
am outside Austin, and the old Gregory Gym. In fact, they still lived in the Bayreuth mansion in Pemberton Heights, which was, as Jean liked to say, only modestly grand. In those days millionaires lived like everyone else. But the Kirkendolls had style. His parties were full of congressmen and other local celebrities, prominent journalists, even television presenters, and ever since they were kids the Essinger children had dreaded going to them.

  “Nathan can go,” Bill said.

  “Why should he go?”

  “Well, he minds it less than everybody else.”

  “Paul asked Dana to stay over at his house,” she said. You make these resolutions and then you break them. They don’t even last five minutes.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, but he asked her last night.”

  She still lay in bed—Bill’s phone call woke her though this was usually when she got up anyway—and could tell, from the vague white glow of the curtains, that another mild overcast morning was in the cards. Their bedroom opened on to a dressing room, which twenty years ago they had turned into a study. A little Art Deco settee, covered in frayed green velvet, stood next to an old desk, though nobody ever worked there. It looked like a room her own mother might have sat in, paid bills in, retired to, to escape her children, nothing had changed … and when Liesel put on her glasses she could see it, and the gap in the curtains, and a branch of the crepe myrtle tree, waving outside.

  “I still don’t understand what that means,” Bill said. “What did she say?”

  “I couldn’t hear, the kids were all talking. Jean says I’m making it up but I heard it.” She added, “Henrik’s coming tomorrow.” All of these things were happening, and he was away, but then, in the background, in the three-dimensional space suggested by the depth or static quality of the telephone line, the heat of the earpiece against her ear, she heard Judith’s voice, saying something, she could only make out the tone, a good-morning voice, and Bill, from the front parlor turned around to see Judith walking down the stairs, in her thick terry-cloth bathrobe, with her hair unwashed, her glasses on, her face unmade up, and she said, “You see me as I really am, Uncle Bill.”

  “I should go,” he said. “Judith is here and I want to get to the hospital.”

  “Give Rose my love,” and he hung up.

  But it took Judith an hour to get ready and he sat around waiting. First she made coffee and carried it up to her bedroom, she showered and dressed, then when she finally came down she wanted breakfast. She didn’t seem to feel any hurry, any urgency, and called her mother-in-law in Chicago to see if Mikey could Skype. Her one concession was to eat her bowl of cereal in front of the computer, but her idea of communicating in this way was simply to leave the computer on and go about her business while he lived in the background—Mikey was watching TV, sitting on a white leather sofa. Most of the light in the room came from the television, and you could see his face in the glow of changing images.

  Meanwhile Judith decided to clean out her mother’s fridge. The opened milk was sour, there was half a carton of slightly fizzy juice, restaurant leftovers in stained containers, she started throwing them all out and couldn’t find another garbage bag. Occasionally she looked at her son, she tried to get his attention. “Guess who I’m going to see today. Granma—Granma Rose. I want something to tell her about you. She likes hearing stuff about you, it cheers her up. Hey, Mikey. She likes hearing news. You guys doing something fun?” But he seemed happy enough staring at the box and Judith had to break through to her mother-in-law: “Leah? Leah?” All of this went on an unbelievable length of time. When Leah came (her face a gray blotch, she didn’t know where the camera was), Judith couldn’t help herself. “How much TV is he watching?” she asked. “Is Gabe around? I mean, it’s Christmas, right? The clinic is closed?” And so on.

  Bill said, touching her on the shoulder, “I’m gonna walk around the block. Maybe we can go when I get back.”

  So he put on his coat and walked out—into the cold air, one of the mornings of his childhood, snow on the ground, blue skies, the kind of neighborhood he grew up in. His breath was visible and he walked in the middle of the road. Most people hadn’t cleared the sidewalks yet, snow and ice, the neighborhood was getting older, and he followed the ridges of car tracks carefully beside the park. There wasn’t any traffic on the road. Christmas Day.

  When he came back in, after stamping his feet on the porch (his toes had frozen, he couldn’t feel them), Judith said, “I turned the sound off on my phone last night in the movie theater and forgot to plug it in when we got home. The map function uses a lot of battery, it’s dead.”

  “Are you ready to go?”

  “I want to see if I have any calls.”

  “Can’t you check in the car?”

  “I just want to charge it first.”

  “Can’t you charge it at the hospital?”

  “They don’t like you using phones in the hospital.” But in the end, she gave in—both of them a little bad-tempered as they climbed in the car. Which was a shame; they had been getting along pretty well. But maybe this was a part of that, too. Affectionate friction. At least the car started and the roads were almost completely empty; it’s funny how quickly certain journeys become routine. He took Ashburton and Broadway, he liked driving through Yonkers and avoided the Parkway, it gave him some pleasure to see the simple brick houses, the fire escapes, even the discount stores and rundown pharmacies, the Chinese restaurants, beauty salons, and graffitied store-front grilles, the For Rent signs, and plants in the upstairs windows, signs of life. And then on Broadway itself the big apartment buildings with their unused balconies, maybe a few bicycles or laundry racks, plastic toys, exposed to the weather, the tall leafless trees, the public basketball courts, and later on, closer to the hospital, the grander houses on plots of sloping lawn that Judith liked to fantasize about. Some of them were probably split into apartments. Even the parking garage, the entrance to the hospital, the corridors you take, the elevators, these quickly become familiar, too.

  Except that Rose wasn’t in her old room and the nurse at reception didn’t know who they were talking about. She had been off all week, her shift started at six a.m. Patients with MRSA get their own rooms. The hallway is separated from the rest of the wing by locked double doors, you need to get buzzed in, and often there’s nobody at the desk so that you stand there waiting for several minutes until someone lets you through. All of which meant that Judith was moderately annoyed even before the duty nurse told her she didn’t know where Mrs. Weintraub was—Rose had kept her married name after the divorce.

  “I thought that’s what computers were for,” Judith said. “Look her up.”

  But the system had crashed that morning, they were coming back online right now. If you want to wait in the waiting area I’ll come find you when …

  “I used to work in a hospital,” Judith said. “This is not … The first thing that goes when things are going wrong is the paperwork.”

  Bill stood beside her, not saying much. Sometimes, he knew, it helps to raise a stink, but at the same time, he was basically nonconfrontational outside of family life. These people are doing a job, it’s not a job that he would want to do. And you end up in the same place anyway, sitting on the fake leather chairs, staring at the television, which was still tuned to CNN.

  One of these financial roundup shows was on—an end-of-year thing, people talking about stock market picks, the best and worst of 2012. Everybody was in good spirits. There was a Christmas tree in the studio, but instead of ornaments, lights, and candy canes, various S&P 500 listings hung off it, with arrow signs going up or down, and the hosts walked over to the tree and untangled the signs from the branches (it was a real tree, and there was something strangely unrehearsed or authentic about the way these signs got caught up among the complicated needles and had to be extracted, by people who at the same time were concentrating on what they were saying, stuff like “If you bought in July, which was wh
en I told you to buy, and sold up now …”) and either threw away the ornament afterward—accompanied by sound effects, noises like leaking balloons or breaking glass—or hung it higher on the tree.

  Bill, almost in spite of himself, found himself paying attention: Radian Group stocks did well, a company called Lumber Liquidators, Stratasys … meanwhile Judith was looking for a socket to plug her phone into. An Indian-looking man, balding, in an itchy wool sweater, sat with his hands in his lap and a composed expression on his face, while the television emitted at a low volume (almost too quiet for Bill to hear, although the general mood of the show came across anyway) its conversational atmosphere, which contrasted strongly with the fact that nobody in the waiting room was talking.

  Then Judith said, “Gabe called me,” and Bill said, “What did he want,” and she said, “I don’t know, he called me twice last night but didn’t leave a message,” when the doctor walked in. In her white coat, with a blue mask hung around her neck.

  “I don’t know if you remember me,” she said. “I’m Dr. Kleinman, I was one of the doctors looking after Rose.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  Bill struggled to his feet, it wasn’t easy getting out of the soft upholstery.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you, she died last night. I want to say that now so that there’s no …”

  Bill said, “When we left last night she seemed to be …”

  “Sometimes with pneumonia, it can be unpredictable.”

  “I thought she was doing better.”

  “Her temperature started spiking; we couldn’t bring it down. She was in a very weakened state. These things happen fast, but I can assure you that everything that could be done, we tried. She was unconscious the whole time, she wouldn’t have felt …”