Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

“When are we going home?”

  “After New Year. You know that—in about a week.”

  “I don’t think I can be in this house with everybody. I’m too ashamed.”

  Susie asked, “Why did you do it?” Her tone was not in her control. “I don’t understand why you would do something like that.”

  “I don’t know. I just wanted to. I don’t know.”

  “You have to be in this house. This is my family. We can’t run away just because …”

  “I’m your family, too. I don’t think I can face them.”

  “Who can’t you face? Julie? She’ll just think it’s a stupid …”

  “Uncle Nathan. I don’t want to talk to Nathan about it.”

  “I don’t much want to talk to Nathan about it either,” Susie said, with something like returning humor.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. What do you want me to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Should I go to my room?”

  “There is no punishment. For this kind of thing … there is no punishment.”

  “I can’t talk to Nathan about it. After …” and he paused. For almost the first time in his life he was conscious of saying something intimate, something painful and secret that had happened to him, which he could communicate. “After Julie ran inside, I walked back to the house, and Nathan was standing on the patio. He couldn’t see me, I was standing under the tree, but I was … scared of him.”

  “How do you think Julie felt?”

  He didn’t answer, and then he asked, “Is there anything else you want to say to me?”

  “Not right now.”

  “Please don’t talk to me about it again. You promised.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Susie said and went up to shower.

  *

  Bowl by plate by glass the table was cleared, cartons of juice and milk were squeezed precariously into the crowded fridge, boxes of cereal and jars of jam, honey, and golden raisins put back in the cupboards under the kitchen counter. Various sections of the New York Times, which arrived every morning, wandered from the counter to the table to the TV room. Some were occasionally removed from circulation, read in the bathroom, refolded and returned, slightly damp.

  In the after-breakfast period of hanging around, an argument broke out about who in the family should represent the Essingers at the annual Kirkendoll Boxing Day brunch. Nathan said somebody had to go. He was willing to go on his own but he didn’t see why … and he would like Clémence to come with him, but that meant either bringing the kids (and Julie interrupted here, “I don’t think I’m up to it.”), or somebody staying behind to look after them.

  “I’ll stay,” Clémence said. Her dark pretty narrow face conveyed a certain amount of cheerful force. Nathan tried to argue with her but got nowhere. “I’m not leaving Julie after last night. I’m staying right here,” and Julie, who was almost as tall as her mother, let herself be pulled against her side.

  David was happy to come, he liked a party, and he wanted to see the Bayreuth mansion, but he didn’t know what Susie’s plans were—she was in the shower. He was sensitive to emotional undercurrents but not always insightful or accurate about what caused them, and felt there was some conflict being played out, between Nathan and Clémence, which he didn’t understand, something marital he wanted to steer clear of.

  Liesel asked, “Does it look bad do you think if I stay behind?”

  “I think you should come,” Nathan said, while at the same time Jean told her, “It’s fine.”

  Jean herself was just killing time until she had to pick up Henrik from the airport. His flight went via Chicago, and Nathan said, “Never fly through Chicago,” and Jean said, “I told him that … I told him that. It’s even worse, he’s got like an hour and a half for the connection, but if all goes well, which it won’t, he should be landing a little after four. I don’t particularly want to go to the Kirkendolls but I honestly can’t say that I have anything else to do, unless someone needs me to look after their kids.”

  Dana said, “Cal’s still asleep, but I don’t want to leave him and I don’t really want to take him along.”

  “I’d like your company.” Nathan was still trying to win the argument with Clémence. He spoke in his private voice, a kind of urgent undertone, the voice he used to say, I have strong feelings on the subject but I understand if you don’t share them. Clémence shook her head. “We can talk about this later.” Liesel was always relieved to see Nathan’s wife stand up to him—it was one of her consolations that she thought they had a very healthy marriage.

  “Anyway,” she said, “I have to shower, I have to get dressed, I want to call Bill. Nothing’s going to happen in the next hour, is it?”

  But it was already after ten o’clock and Nathan’s disappointment was turning into impatience. Jean said, “Go shower, make yourself beautiful,” and Liesel on her way out of the kitchen put her hand against the pot of coffee under the machine, which was already cool, and poured herself a cold cup, which she took upstairs with her.

  “Has anyone called Paul?” Jean asked, and Dana felt and not for the last time a flush of shame.

  *

  In the end only the men went, Nathan and David and Paul, in Paul’s car—he showed up at the house a half hour later. Cal was awake, he looked like himself again, and Paul lifted the boy wriggling above his head, pinning his back to the kitchen ceiling. Dana said to him, “Please, he’s only just …” but Paul said, “It’s just nice to see him like …” and Dana said, “I know. You don’t realize until afterward. It’s like I can breathe again.” They ended up having another argument about going to the party, and Julie said to her uncle, “You’re just exactly and totally like my dad.”

  Clémence stepped in and said “the girls” would do something together—knowing the phrase would annoy Nathan, but teasing him about it, too. He was freshly shaved, ready to go, in suit and tie. They were just waiting for Susie … who appeared eventually, with her wet hair drawn back in a ponytail, so that her face and neck seemed somehow exposed and vulnerable, though it also made her look a little severe. Her Quaker look, David called it. Everybody had to go over everything again, making plans. Nathan said, “I don’t like it. I’ve said what I wanted. I want you to come,” but Clémence didn’t budge and eventually the men drove off.

  It was warm enough to leave the window open—Nathan felt the breeze against his face. His wife at the last minute had tried to comb his hair down, using her fingers, but he shrugged her off; it stuck out anyway. For various reasons he was in a complicated mood.

  Nathan had always been closer to Judge Kirkendoll than the other Essinger children. This was sometimes embarrassing, because you don’t want to admit to liking somebody your brother and sisters have lumped together with all the other adults you try to avoid at dinner parties. But Nathan was old enough to remember some of the earlier stages of his father’s friendship with the judge, when Bill and Kirk were still junior faculty who met occasionally to play pool or watch a ball game (Nathan as a four-year-old boy sometimes watched them play, or watched them watch) … before the other children took over Bill’s social life, and he drifted away from his colleagues. As Nathan got older, Kirk sometimes talked to him about Bill—about the fact that he wouldn’t play the games you need to play if you want to climb the ladder. It didn’t need to be said that Kirk was teaching Nathan what these games were, so that he when he grew up Nathan would not repeat his father’s mistakes.

  Which is why he still felt embarrassed by their relationship. It looked to the rest of the family (or so he figured it to himself) like he was taking sides against their father. Kirk used to buy him ties or IZOD shirts for his birthday, the kind of expensive and conservative clothes his own parents would never spend money on. They shared a sense of style, but Nathan had also in his own way tried to distance himself from the judge.

  In law school, he brought his girlfriend back to Austin and introduced him to the Kirkendolls; they went to dinner at
the Bayreuth mansion. The next summer, while he was interning in Manhattan with Sullivan and Cromwell, Kirk, who had helped him get the job, took him out to lunch at the Century Club. He said how much he enjoyed meeting Jenny (that was the name of the girlfriend). One of the pleasures of youth, he said, is that you get to meet a lot of nice girls, smart, interesting girls, it’s one of the ways a young man gets to know the world. Nathan understood what was meant and didn’t react or contradict him, which he was afterward ashamed of, but he also fought harder than he otherwise might have when his relationship to Jenny naturally came to an end. After law school, she went home to work for Bakers and Hostetler, and when he tried to find a job in Seattle, too, she put a stop to it. Who are we kidding, she said. This is not where your life is.

  Kirkendoll, as it happens, approved of Clémence. He thought she was a good thing, and told Bill, who told Nathan. This irritated him but not enough to keep him from showing up at the judge’s Boxing Day party. Apart from anything else, Kirk had friends in Congress, including Elizabeth Warren and various members of the Texas delegation to the House. He had friends across the aisle, too, and there was even a chance that Kaye Bailey Hutchinson would come down from Dallas. Nathan if he wanted to be a federal judge needed to get his name in front of these people. Kirk could help him do that, or maybe this is the kind of thing you tell yourself, when you want something you don’t know how to get, or where the decision is really in other people’s hands.

  *

  Paul waited at the slow lights by the old Schwinn bicycle shop, where all of the Essinger kids got their first bikes, then crossed over North Lamar and the Shoal Creek greenbelt, before rising up West 29th into Pemberton Heights. Trees spread over the gritty asphalt. They passed what Liesel always called the ship house, an old Art Deco mansion built against the slope, with white walls and curved metal windows, balconies overlooking the creek, a terraced garden, and a For Sale sign stuck in the driveway.

  “Why didn’t you buy that?” Nathan said. “Why didn’t you move there?”

  “Too urban.”

  Paul was only partly joking. David sat in back and listened to them, feeling like one of the kids and slightly fed up. When they got in Paul’s car Nathan automatically took the passenger seat. Maybe he was a couple of inches taller, but David was also aware, this is a power play. Or maybe Nathan genuinely didn’t notice or care. They were brothers, after all, it was their town, and for one week of Christmas David understood that he was just tagging along; but he was also quietly glad to be taking Susie away from all this. Individually, he liked most of the family (especially Bill and Jean), and even though his relationship with Nathan wasn’t straightforward, he could appreciate his virtues and charms. But collectively … there was a kind of self-involvement or self-importance that struck him as bad form—and like most bad form, makes you unhappy.

  Pemberton Heights counted as old Austin, though most of it was developed in the Thirties or later. There were the usual colonials, painted white and gray, with pillared porticos and fenced-in yards, but also a few stranger constructions, ivied castles and contemporary faux-moderns that looked like parts of supermarkets. When the Bayreuth mansion was built, the land was mostly farmland, and you still had a sense of grassy spaciousness from the wide front lawns. Tall trees let through a lot of light—the cloudy morning was giving way to another mild curiously dead and pleasant sunny afternoon. Paul felt hungry and light-headed; he hadn’t eaten much after his eight-mile run, but he parked where he could (a few blocks past the house; the curb was crowded) and they got out and walked back to the party.

  The judge’s home had a faint New Orleans feel to it, with French windows and fretwork metal balconies on every floor—Christmas lights had been strung through the railings and glittered and blinked. Two women in black aprons stood next to the pillars at the end of the brick front path and one of them had a tray in her hand, with glasses of champagne.

  David decided to get drunk. He didn’t know anybody but he didn’t want to hang around Paul and Nathan and was perfectly happy talking to strangers. The hall was already full of people, most of them in their sixties, and the doors on either side, to the library or living room, and then to the kitchen and dining room at the back, were hard to pass through—people had a tendency to get stuck. David with his farmer’s shoulders and businessman’s belly took up a lot of room, but he could use his accent to get him through most tight spaces and he pushed his way into the library, where there was a fire going. The trick (David had found) in a party like this where you don’t know anybody is to start by talking to the photographer, who is usually standing alone and happy to have a little conversation. In this case she turned out to be a friend of the judge’s younger daughter, a woman in her twenties named Ilyana or Alana or Elaine (it was too loud to hear), who was working on a master’s in Mexican-American studies at the university. She was really just doing a favor, though she couldn’t quite tell who was helping out whom—they were paying her pretty well.

  “I’ve just walked in from the street,” David said. “Maybe you can tell me who everyone is.”

  “I don’t really know either …” but she knew enough.

  Paul said to Nathan, “I really need to eat something. I don’t know why I’m here.”

  More women in black aprons circulated with trays of food, but the going for everybody was pretty slow, and Paul found a buffet of breads and cheeses laid out on the dining-room table. Nathan ran into somebody from the law school and got lost on the way, so Paul stood by himself and spread brie over a piece of baguette and ate and felt the calories make their way into his bloodstream. He hated this kind of thing, this is exactly the kind of thing that made him want to get out of New York in the first place. But for some reason Nathan wanted him to come along so he came. Most of the people there were people with money but nobody you had any reason to recognize, lawyers and businessmen and their wives. One of the judge’s neighbors presented the six o’clock news on KXAN, the local Austin affiliate of NBC. On air she had a very natural presence, her blonde hair was untied and she looked pretty in a perfectly appropriate and PTA kind of way, but when he saw her she looked exactly the way she looked on TV but somehow the effect was more like a kind of confection and you noticed her human strangeness. Still, she’s what counted for a celebrity, and the pockets of people moved around her accordingly, so he ate and watched.

  The Kirkendolls had three kids, the oldest was roughly Paul’s age. At family get-togethers (which didn’t happen often; they were much more social than the Essingers), there was a kind of expectation that Paul and this girl would interact. Her name was Elsa, after the judge’s grandmother. She went to St. Stephens, which was private, instead of McCallum High, where Paul went, and he always found contact with her embarrassing in a teenage way that had somehow survived their childhoods on the few subsequent occasions when they had met. They were now thirty-five, and he saw her talking to a woman with a kind of hairnet until she excused herself and joined him at the buffet table.

  “I sometimes see you running through Stacy Park, but you’re going so fast I don’t dare to say hello.”

  He remembered something he had forgotten, which is that she flirted with you almost out of good manners—the way little girls are taught to say please and thank you. She was always complimentary.

  “Maybe it’s someone else. I don’t usually run along there. I live out near Wimberley now.”

  “No, it was you, but maybe you were on your bike. I think there was a group of you.”

  “That’s possible,” he said.

  Elsa had put on weight but she carried herself like an attractive woman, and in fact she was still reasonably pretty. Her eyes were large and clear, and she used them—Paul often found himself looking away, partly because she wore too much makeup (Dana hardly needed any). One of the things he always liked about Elsa as a kid is that she liked to eat, and he watched her fill one of the paper plates with bean salad, guacamole, and French bread. She worked in arts admi
nistration, whatever that means, and was on the board of the Blanton Museum, among other things. His impression of her was that she went to a lot of openings and parties, though he had also heard that she wasn’t married.

  “Is that where you live?” he asked.

  “I’m sort of house-sitting right now. A friend of mine has moved to Buenos Aires, she’s got one of these residency things, so I’m staying in her apartment in Travis Heights.”

  This wasn’t what he expected, and he didn’t understand it. The Kirkendolls had a lot of money. Elsa leaned over and said, “My father is very excited. Guess who said she might come?”

  “I don’t know. What do you mean? To the party?”

  “Sandra Bullock. She’s selling her house in Barton Creek and wants to look around Pemberton Heights.”

  “I didn’t know …” but someone had pulled Elsa away, and she made an excuse-me face, and let herself be pulled. He looked around for Nathan but couldn’t find him, so he looked around for David and saw him talking to a woman with a camera around her neck. For some reason he didn’t want to interrupt. If he had to guess he would have said she was in her early twenties, she had a pleasant young-person’s face. While they talked, she kept taking pictures, but David seemed to be making her laugh. And something like envy, or not even envy, just a realization of what he was actually like began to settle on Paul. Everyone else at the party had dressed for the occasion. The women wore jewelry, some of the men wore ties. Paul, who hadn’t expected to be showing up at any social functions when he set off for Wheeler Street, was still in his jeans and sneakers, and the Wheatsville Co-op T-shirt he bought for Dana once, and which she didn’t want. When the waitresses came by with their trays of food, he tried to joke with them. “Keep ’em coming,” he said. “I’m the guy you can rely on to empty the tray,” but the woman he said this to didn’t react and only waited patiently for him to put his toothpick back.

  He walked outside, into the yard. A few people were smoking on the grass, and he found himself checking the faces for Elsa, not because he was particularly attracted to her but because she was somebody he knew and could talk to. But also maybe because he found her attractive. It was hard to say, he was in a state of preoccupation. He was also aware of one of the waitresses, a light-skinned black woman, very tall and thin, who somehow reminded him of Dana and sometimes lifted her tray over the heads of the guests as she squeezed between them … the fact that he paid her attention made him unhappy. So far they hadn’t made eye contact, and he felt somehow like the hungry male, eating food and looking at women, and not talking, a phrase he had heard one of Dana’s friends use to describe that guy at the party who … just kind of stands there, and it had stuck with him.