Christmas in Austin

by Benjamin Markovits

  “Okay,” he said. “Give me a minute. Let me think.” Then he said, “I can come get you, but it will take me almost an hour to get there.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. I’d ask Paul to drive me but Cal is already asleep.”

  After washing her hands and face (and drying them on Cal’s towel), she emerged from the bathroom. Paul was waiting; the projector hummed faintly overhead. She didn’t say anything. They sat on the sofa and watched The Breakfast Club, which was one of the movies he had on DVD. When he tried to kiss her, she kissed him back, but then she wriggled out of it and said she wanted to watch. He was clearly just sitting there waiting for it to end, he was biding his time, and she found this so unpleasant that it kept her going until Nathan arrived.

  *

  Nathan put down the phone and sat at his mother’s desk without getting up. His grandfather’s letter lay next to the computer, along with Liesel’s translation; she used a little metal donkey as a paperweight. Next door, they were all singing Hanukkah songs, one of the ones with a marching cadence: Mi Yimalel. When he came back into the living room, he saw that Henrik had fallen asleep on the couch. The fire was lit, Jean was sitting at his feet.

  She said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. Walk with me to the car.”

  “What’s going on?” Clémence asked.

  “I’ll tell you later,” he said, and Jean followed him out.

  Nathan still had the keys to the Volvo, which was sitting in the drive. Jean wore only a T-shirt, it was really very cold. She said, “Who was on the phone?”

  “Dana. She wants me to pick her up.”

  “Why?”

  “She didn’t say, but I think I should go.”

  “Let me go, you don’t like driving at night.”

  “No, I talked to her, I should go. I think this could have real repercussions, you shouldn’t have to deal with it.”

  “Why should you?”

  Julie had followed them out, she was standing in the doorway with the door open—letting in the cold. Nathan called to her, “Go inside. Nothing is going on. It’s fine,” but she came out in bare feet anyway.

  “If nothing’s going on, why are you standing out here?”

  She had followed them down the steps, and her father put an arm around her.

  “I have to pick up Dana.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. She asked me to pick her up.”

  “What about Paul?”

  “Look, I don’t really know what’s going on. But I guess I’ll find out.”

  “You don’t like driving at night,” Julie said.

  “Let me go,” Jean broke in. “He won’t get so mad at me.”

  “There may be some truth in what you say, but I feel like, I said to Dana that I would come.”

  “Call her back. Call Paul.”

  “The sense I got from her is that’s not what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to come.”

  “What about Paul?”

  “I don’t know,” Nathan said and got in the car. Clémence had come out, too, she was standing on the front porch. Somebody called out, “Shut the door.”

  Julie asked, “Can I tell her what’s going on?”

  “You can tell her.”

  He had driven out to Wimberley four or five times in his life. The first part was easy enough, you pulled onto I-35 and at this time of night, the access road, which could be tricky, was usually clear. Later, if he needed to look on his phone, he could stop at a gas station or whatever, but he thought he’d remember where to go when he saw the exit signs. He told himself, I have to be careful how this plays out, but he had at least fifty minutes in the car to think. Part of what bugged him was his own sense of responsibility. Because if it had to do with sibling rivalry, or some kind of controlling instinct, which you get used to acting on as a big brother, Paul could reasonably reproach him for it afterward. But the truth is, he didn’t want to go, and if somebody else could have picked up the phone and spoken to Dana, he would have let them go. He was almost sure of that. He felt sick about it, but he also needed to concentrate. One of the reasons he didn’t like driving at night is he worried about falling asleep.

  It was ten o’clock by the time he pulled up at the house. The outside air had a kind of crystal quality. For the last ten miles, he had driven with the windows open. Paul answered the door. The lights were off behind him, Nathan could see the fire dying in the stove and the flickering of the movie against the wall. The sound was low, and Dana had stood up, too.

  “Hey,” Paul said, surprised. “What’s up?”

  “Dana called. She asked me to pick her up.”

  “What are you talking about?” And Dana said, “I called him.”

  “What’s going on?” Paul said, and Nathan knew that whatever came out of tonight was going to be worse than he feared.

  “I can’t stay here. It’s too weird. We’re not even talking about anything.”

  “So let’s talk.”

  “That’s what I wanted to do.”

  “No, it’s not,” Paul said, and she knew he was right.

  “I don’t want to live with you out here, that’s not what I want.”

  “Do we have to do this now?”

  “I don’t want to … homeschool Cal, I don’t want …”

  “No one’s talking about that.”

  “You were talking about that.”

  “So send him to school, I don’t care.” His face, under strain, looked hollow; he had lost weight, it was the face of a homeless man.

  Dana said, “Let’s talk tomorrow.”

  “Okay, so let’s talk tomorrow.”

  “I can’t sleep here tonight.”

  “What are you talking about?” He was speaking too loudly and knew it, he sounded like somebody it’s reasonable to be afraid of, but he couldn’t help himself.

  Nathan said, “Paul. Nothing good can happen tonight. Let me take her home and we can talk in the morning.”

  “What’s Cal going to think when he wakes up and she’s not here?”

  “You can bring him in the morning,” and Dana said, “We can wake him up now and take him home.” She wanted to see him, to hold him, but Paul was closer to the bedroom door.

  “You’re not waking him up, that’s not going to happen.”

  Suddenly she started shouting. “Cal!’ she shouted, “Cal!’ but not really loud enough to wake him, and she knew it. It was a protest and she felt stupid.

  Paul told his brother, “This is what you’re getting involved in, this kind of craziness?”

  Nathan looked at him, utterly helpless, almost childish. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I should do.”

  Paul had never seen him like this, or not in thirty years.

  “Go home,” he said. “Turn around and go home.”

  “I can’t do that. You have to make this easier for me. You have to help me out.”

  But in the end, he didn’t have to do much. Dana hadn’t unpacked yet, her suitcase was by the door. She said, “I want to give him a kiss, I want to see him,” but Paul wouldn’t let her. He stood in front of Cal’s bedroom and she didn’t want to go near him. Nathan said, “Come on, Paul,” but he wouldn’t budge. “Don’t act like I’m the dangerous one here. This is crazy.” Dana was frantic now. “Bring him in the morning. Let me see him in the morning,” but Nathan persuaded her to come away. Afterward he told himself, it could have been worse. If she had tried to get in his room, it could have been worse. As they walked outside into the cold again, and got in Nathan’s car, Paul followed them. You could see their breaths in the garden lights; a few flakes were falling. Footsteps echoed under the low sky. Nathan backed out of the drive and watched his brother standing there, by the open door.

  *

  There wasn’t any traffic on the drive back. Nathan hadn’t been at the house more than ten minutes; he got back t
o Wheeler Street around eleven o’clock. Dana in the car was almost flat with grief; she was cold, too. She had left her cardigan behind. Nathan turned up the heat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “None of this is your problem.”

  “I don’t want to ask you what happened, or what’s going on. I don’t want to know anything Paul doesn’t know, or be part of any conversation without him.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m trying to get through this without doing permanent damage to any of these relationships.”

  “Okay,” Dana said. In fact, she fell asleep on the road, and Nathan had to wake her up. Liesel was waiting in her study—he could see the light on. Jean was up, too; Henrik had gone to bed. She met him in the hall and said, “Clémence asked me to say, you should wake her up when you get in. I told her what happened, as far as I knew.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Jean said to Dana, “Can I get you anything, do you want a cup of tea?”

  “I just want to go to bed. I don’t want to see anybody.”

  They were speaking quietly—sound carried in the stairwell, and Susie’s family was already asleep upstairs.

  “Your bedroom is still … I mean, just go to bed,” and when Dana went to her room she noticed that she had clean sheets. There was a fresh towel on the blanket. Cal’s mattress was put away, too.

  Jean said to Nathan, “What happened?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Paul was completely blindsided. This isn’t going to go away.”

  “What were they doing?”

  “So far as I can tell, they were watching a movie.”

  “So you took her home?”

  “That’s what she asked me to do. I don’t know if I did right, I didn’t want to gang up against her.”

  “I’m sure you did what you could.”

  “Well, I don’t know. Listen, I’m tired, I’m going to go to bed. There’ll be a lot of conversation in the morning, which right now I don’t think anybody can face.”

  “Don’t forget to wake Clémence,” Jean said, and put her arm on his shoulder.

  *

  The phone rang, and Liesel picked up. Bill had said he would call her tonight after everybody left. She wanted to talk to Nathan but she couldn’t face Dana and had waited for her to go upstairs. Then the phone rang and she missed them both.

  Bill said, “Well, it’s over,” and Liesel said, “How did it go?”

  “The funeral was what I expected it to be,” and he started talking. He mentioned that he went to visit the house in Port Jervis, he told the story. Honestly, he said, after living with Judith for a week, you can’t help but … admire her. She fights every fight. But the reception at Rose’s house was something else. Twenty, thirty people came, and not just seat-fillers from the synagogue. Rosario came, with her two kids. This was Rose’s cleaner, who worked for her for thirty years. Her daughter is a junior at Manhattan College, studying communications. She wants to be a sports reporter; her son is going to be a freshman next year. He’s on the baseball team. Both of these kids had vivid memories of Rose, they were extremely articulate … Good company. It took them two hours to get here from Oceanside, which is where Rosario lives now. Let me tell you, the number of people she formed meaningful relations with, given the limited means at her disposal. I mean, for the last five years of her life, Rose hardly left the house. And this evening they just kept coming. Thirty, forty people, they ate up the food, the living room was full. We had to bring in dining chairs from the kitchen. The last person left at ten o’clock. Judith went right to bed, it’s been a long day. Our flight isn’t till one o’clock. I told her, we can clean up in the morning. And then he said, “What’s going on with you.” It was as much a statement as a question, he’d been talking too much.

  “Something happened with Paul and Dana,” Liesel told him. “I don’t know what. She was supposed to stay the night in Wimberley, but Nathan had to pick her up. Jean says she’s seeing somebody in New York, but she never said anything to the rest of us. I don’t think Paul knew.”

  It was the first tug on the cord, pulling him back.

  FRIDAY

  It snowed overnight, enough to leave a crust on the lawn. Liesel looked out on a blank garden, two of the kids were already out there, making tracks. Even with her glasses on, she couldn’t see who they were. Her eyes were bad, especially in the morning, and the children flickered in a white half-light. Different-shaped smudges. Every five or ten years it snowed in Austin, enough to stick, and when it did, the garden looked like it might be anywhere. It might be Germany or sixty years ago. One of the kids was pulling the other one along on … maybe it was a trash-can lid. There was a lid with a rope attached to it. What was happening to them was happening in the depths of their own childhood and they would look back later as if it lay at the bottom of a deep well.

  Usually Liesel went down to breakfast in her nightgown, but today she got dressed; she wanted to walk outside. Nathan came out to join her on the patio. He wore pajamas and a sweater and his running shoes, without socks. The kids were Ben and Julie. Ben pulled Julie but the lid wasn’t really big enough, she kept having to balance herself on her hands, which were red with cold.

  She said, “Pull harder.”

  “You’re too heavy.”

  “That’s your problem.”

  “When’s it my turn?”

  “When I say so,” but she had to kick herself along, it wasn’t that much fun. Her hands had gone numb and snow trickled into the gap between her shirt and her pants.

  Clémence pushed open the sliding door and stood in the doorway.

  “Excuse my dishabille,” she said to Liesel. And then to Nathan: “Is Julie warm enough?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “I don’t want her to get sick, too.”

  “We’re all going to get sick.”

  “How’s Margot?” Liesel asked, and Clémence told her, “She slept a little better.”

  “I’m so happy it snowed.” Liesel could see her own breath and feel the skin on her face. She could feel that her cheeks were red. “I just hope it doesn’t mean … Bill’s landing at four-thirty.”

  Nathan was staring at the kids. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

  “I’m sure that by then everything will be melted, it will be sixty degrees out.”

  Then he walked out into the backyard; his sneakers crunched on the frozen grass. “Come on, people,” he said. “Let’s see if we can make something.” He bent down and swept his arm against the lawn to cause a pile-up, but the surface layer was hardly an inch thick. The snow was dusty, too; it puffed in his face and stuck to his eyelashes while Liesel watched him.

  *

  The white light woke Dana—she had left the blinds half-open when she went to bed. It took her several hours to fall asleep, because she had slept in the car, and because Cal wasn’t lying on the floor beside her, and because … The panic she had felt rising up inside her in Paul’s house had turned into shame. She was ashamed of the way she sat on the toilet and called Nathan and then walked out again like nothing was going on. She was ashamed of causing trouble for Nathan, too, for the Essingers generally, of disappointing Liesel and accepting her invitation in the first place. In the mood she was in she couldn’t give a reason for any of these decisions. She was making decisions like this because there was nothing in her life that she knew she wanted or was striving toward and so she had no reasons for doing anything. She might as well move in with Stephen in New York and have another baby or move to Wimberley or move home again when her parents got back from their cruise. Her mother could help with Cal; she could save money, and not rely on Paul so much. She could rely on her parents instead. She didn’t want to do any of these things.

  She got up anyway, and dressed, and repacked her suitcase. Her bedroom window overlooked the driveway and the road and she checked to see if maybe Paul had come but she couldn’t see his car. The only thing she really wanted was to see Cal before she left, but it was on
ly seven-thirty—of course they hadn’t come. To get here by now Paul would have had to wake Cal around six o’clock and get him dressed and give him something to eat, and then set out maybe by a quarter to seven. But she was leaving in two hours, she didn’t have much time. It also wasn’t clear how she was getting to the airport, and maybe right now she should just order a cab, but that might look like a statement. Probably someone would drive her. She didn’t want Paul to drive her. The conversation they needed to have wasn’t something they could finish in a half hour on the way to the airport … and she didn’t want Cal to be deserted by both of them at the same time, or have to say goodbye to her again at the airport or have to listen to them argue in the car. She didn’t want to go down to breakfast. She couldn’t face anybody, but she had a kind of courage of appearances. It’s what she’d been brought up to do: show your face and make polite conversation. As a woman generally, her mother had taught her, you should learn to accept a certain amount of unwanted attention gracefully. This didn’t always serve her well, but she stripped the bed and left a pile of sheets on top, then carried her suitcase downstairs.

  Henrik was pouring coffee by the sink when Dana walked in. He had his back to her and didn’t turn around. Jean stood by the kitchen counter, waiting for the toaster to pop. She said, “Morning,” and Susie looked up. Willy was sitting on her lap, and May was in the high chair, playing with Cheerios and throwing them on the carpet. Clémence sat with her elbow on the table and her hand in the air; there was an ice pack around her wrist. Then Liesel stomped in the backdoor and cleaned her feet on the mat. A scattering of snow fell and melted on the wooden floor.

  “Everybody’s up,” she said cheerfully.

  Except David, Susie said. May had caught Cal’s cold. “I don’t think she feels terrible, but she’s all stuffed up and can’t breathe. You can’t explain to her why, and so basically she spent all night saying, why, why, why, unless we walked her up and down. I didn’t want to wake the house.”

  “I didn’t hear anything.” Dana had blushed a little; she poured milk into a bowl of raisin bran.