Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  His mother took his hand. He wondered if he had a streak of misogyny. Probably only in regard to his mother. Other women did not inspire it.

  “Emmy was a little angel today,” the Marschallin said, nodding toward the living room, where Mary Esther was sleeping in Patsy’s arms. Patsy raised her face toward Saul. “How was work?” his mother asked, keeping her voice down. “How was school?”

  The question made him feel like a child. Delia had that effect on him. Saul removed his hand from his mother’s and pursed his lips in Patsy’s direction. He took out a handkerchief to wipe off his mother’s lipstick from his face. But he could feel its imprint there, worming its way through the skin toward his brain. “Work was fine. Someone left me a note. They said I was a kick.”

  “That’s nice,” Delia said dubiously. “A kick? In what sense?”

  “In the sense that . . . oh, you know. A party. That’s a real kick. Fun.”

  Very quietly, from her chair, Patsy said, “Nobody uses that word that way anymore.” Having gathered her blond hair back in a ponytail, she gazed down at Mary Esther and touched the baby’s own perfect feathery hair. Patsy’s beauty was fuller and more human, Saul thought, than his mother’s. It was actionable. You wanted to mate with her. His wife’s beauty made him happy and crazy, and his mother’s beauty just made him crazy, period. Maybe menopause would calm his mother down, but he doubted it.

  “They don’t? Sure they do,” Saul said.

  “Not in a learning-disabilities class, they don’t.” Patsy shook her head. “You can bet your bottom dollar that they don’t use expressions like that.”

  “I agree with Patsy,” Delia announced with a huge smile. “We have womanly solidarity here.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” Saul grumbled, suddenly thirsty for a beer. He wanted to escape from the room and Delia’s presence. There was too much femaleness around all of a sudden. He rushed to the refrigerator for a beer, then returned to the living room so that he could drink it from the bottle in front of his mother. He couldn’t wait until she was gone and Patsy’s relatives arrived. Her parents were sweet and generous and harmless, very fond of Saul. In contrast to his mother, they were not like wild animals in a zoo. He would trade his mother for his mother-in-law anytime. Saul’s mother sat down close to Patsy and threw a large radiant scary smile in her son’s direction.

  “Your brother used to use that expression constantly,” she said. “‘Oh, that’s a kick,’ he’d say.” She examined her fingernails. “Your brother loved kicks.”

  “Yes, he did,” Saul said. “And he still does.” He had not had a phone call or a letter from Howie in ages. It irked him, Howie’s indifference to Patsy and himself and to Mary Esther’s birth. What Howie did was give birth to money, money, and then more money. “Where is he? The last I heard he was rock climbing in Colorado or someplace.”

  “Your handsome brother?” Delia sat up, stretching her long legs wrapped in designer jeans. Then she straightened, somehow displaying herself further, unnecessarily. More of her perfume seemed to seep into the air. It was making Saul light-headed, like pepper-spray. “Howie hasn’t called you? In how long? He promised me he would. Oh, he gave up the rock climbing for a few months. Got it out of his system, I guess. It’s all information technology now. Well, he always did have a head for math. Didn’t I tell you?” Delia looked at Saul as if his ignorance on this subject was his fault. “That friend of his, what’s his name, Gerald Somebody, has got him working in computers and things, some start-up company making programs for instant balance-sheet assessments. Or something digital.” Delia waved her hand abstractedly, conjuring up computers and whirring machinery. “High-speed information flow stuff. He said he’d call. Call you, I mean. I told him about Mary Esther. He seemed interested. I can’t believe Howie hasn’t called you to keep you informed.”

  “That’s nice,” Saul said. “‘Interested’ is nice.” He took a swig of the beer. “I’m pleased about the ‘interested’ part.”

  “Don’t be so ironical about your brother. He doesn’t have all the feelings about things that you have. He’s not so . . .” She searched for the word. “Emotional. He sails along on the surfaces. That’s his gift. Besides, he’s making a lot of money,” Delia reported. “A lot of money, he says, almost by accident. Of course he’s immature, but that’s . . . I wish you wouldn’t drink beer right out of the bottle, sweetheart. Not in the living room.” Saul’s mother made a distaste-expression. It reminded Saul of years of distaste-expressions, and he looked away, though it pleased him that she was annoyed.

  On New Year’s Eve, he would make a resolution about not being petty with his mother, but not until then.

  Saul and his younger brother had never been close. In Saul’s estimation, Howie’s brains and his good looks (he was painfully handsome, everyone said, beautiful, a male version of Delia), and Howie’s efforts to get some distance on their mother had made him simultaneously distant and arrogant, or distantly arrogant. In any case, he was hard to get close to, and his thoughts were often a mystery. Like many extraordinarily good-looking men, he never bothered saying very much. Other people were always trying to talk to him, to make the first move, desperate just to keep him around. Saul’s brother had deep brown eyes, a perfectly symmetrical face with high cheekbones, curly black hair, and perfectly straight posture. His princely appearance was perfect in a way that Saul found unpleasant. People stared at him helplessly. He never shambled anywhere, never had a hair out of place, any clothes looked good on him, and as a result he was always being given special attentions.

  Howie had once called Saul, during the period of Saul’s life when Saul was driving a taxicab in Chicago, to report that two women had proposed marriage to him that very week. This was at Princeton, where Howie was a junior, majoring in math and computer science. Howie thought it was hilarious, all these propositions, all these women, and the men, too, who hung around him, and he thought that Saul would also be amused. Popularity was a stitch. He was a lucky guy, Howie was, starting with his looks and going on from there. In any particular room, if Howie had not slept with all of the women, it was just an oversight. Well, Howie played the part of the grasshopper, and Saul played the part of the ant. Except grasshoppers weren’t also supposed to be smart and to make a lot of money. Winter was supposed to come in due course and kill them dead.

  “Tell him to call me,” Saul said. “Tell Howie to drop us a line and give us his address. Tell him we’re alive and he’s Uncle Howie now, and his niece would like a nice present from him.”

  “I certainly won’t say that. Such a shame,” Delia said mournfully, “that you two don’t get along.”

  “Oh, they get along,” Patsy said. “We just don’t hear much from him. By the way,” she said, sitting up, “who was that character in comic books who made money no matter what he did?” Patsy stood up and swayed back and forth for Mary Esther’s sake. Saul noticed that Patsy had circles under her eyes, a recent detail—a fact—about her that had escaped him. His heart surged like a motor racing, revving up its RPMs, all for her sake. “Money fell out of trees for him. Some duck. Some relative of Donald Duck.”

  “Gladstone Gander,” Saul said, suppressing a belch. On the subject of comic books, books generally, baseball, music, philosophy, and movies, Saul was Mr. Memory.

  “Oh, let’s go outside,” Delia said, staring at Saul’s beer bottle. “For just a moment. For a breath of air. All right, kids? What do you say? It’s getting stuffy in here.”

  “It’s your perfume, Mom,” Saul said. “You’re wearing a gallon of it.”

  “Not quite a gallon.” She smiled. “More like a half-gallon.” She stood up and strode briskly toward the back door, her bracelets and necklace jangling. Saul and Patsy heard the door slam behind her, and then her muffled voice, softly shouting, “It’s beautiful out here!”

  “It can’t be beautiful,” Saul said. “It’s March.” He looked at Patsy. “It’s too cold to take the baby outside,” he said softly.
“What is she thinking?” His eyes scanned his wife’s face. “When will we ever make love again, honey? Can you tell me that? I’m dying over here.”

  Just then he heard his mother scream, a subtle scream, half-private. For a moment he thought it was because he had propositioned his wife. Collecting himself, Saul rushed out past the kitchen into the mud room, out through the back porch with its snow shovel, sand bucket, and bag of salt, onto the wood steps that descended unevenly to the back lawn, covered here and there with patches of dirty snow.

  The air had cleared itself of clouds and overcast, and the moon was back in the sky. Just to the side of the steps, the Marschallin stood in the moonlight, her red hair looking silver gray, just as if she had aged thirty years within the past minute. Then Saul realized it was only the effect of the moonlight, and he said, “Mom, it’s just the moonlight. You’re not that old.”

  She turned toward him, stricken. “What’re you talking about? What ever on earth are you talking about, Saul? Look!”

  She pointed one of her long fingers, decorated with its red nail polish that in the moonlight also looked gray, and he followed where she indicated to the middle of the field, where the albino deer walked with a slight stagger, an arrow sticking out of its back leg, seemingly blinded and wounded now by Saul’s students, the pimply Cossacks. Still, the deer was alive, as it slowly faded back into the dark. Saul considered his options, all of them vague and transitory: he would have tried to run after it, that animal, somehow take its pain away, but for now he was not equipped with the necessary time and energy and speed for that particular kind of rescue.

  Five

  For the first two weeks after Mary Esther’s birth, Saul and Patsy’s neighbors and friends had called ahead, following country manners, before bringing over dishes of food. Day in and out, the food had accumulated on the kitchen counter and in the refrigerator: chicken-and-noodle casseroles and Jell-O salads and desserts, baked beans, and one poached salmon cooked by a fellow teacher at the school, a subscriber to Gourmet magazine and an avid watcher of the Food Network.

  But Saul could be picky. “Well, it’s certainly not Jew food,” he had said after his friend Hugh Welch left. He picked up Hugh’s donated honey-baked ham before he pretended to pass it, like a football, through the kitchen window. “This is pig meat.”

  “Don’t complain,” Patsy said. “You’re doing all this for effect. You like ham as much as I do, and you’re just going for cheap laughs.” She took the ham out of his hand and tried to stuff it into the refrigerator, where there was no room for it. “And I like Hugh, besides.”

  “Listen, I’m fully assembled in America, but he’s doing this as an ethnic insult, and I’m not being paranoid. At least I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, right. Honey,” she said, “calm down.” She turned around and gave him a square smile, beautiful and radiant but not without analytic substance. “You’re an imposter. I’ve seen you eat ham. Ham and sausage and bacon. You’re just playing to the galleries. I suppose next you’ll be keeping kosher. Besides,” she said, “these are gifts, Saul. I’d really appreciate it if you were grateful to your friends, because they’re my friends, too. Stop being a snob.”

  “Sometimes they’re only your friends,” he said.

  She gave him a long look. “And sometimes they’re only yours.”

  “Okay. You want to divide them? Which ones are yours?” he asked. “Which ones aren’t? Let’s divide them up, Patsy, your friends and my friends, and let’s see who has more. The winner has more friends than the loser. The winner gets to go to the state fair for free.”

  He stood near the table, balancing on one leg.

  “Honey,” she said, “if you want to have a fight, we’ll fight about something actual when you’re ready to do that. And not until then. Actually, not a damn moment before that.”

  They had gazed at each other carefully, as if they were entering a new landscape of embittered matrimony, one they had only heard about but never seen until now.

  Harold, Saul’s barber, stared down into the crib and at Mary Esther while the meatloaf he had brought cooled under its tinfoil in the kitchen. With the gray March overcast behind her, Mrs. O’Neill, beaming fixedly on the front stoop with her expression of paralyzed charity, offered them a container of the ginger cookies that, despite her aging and memory loss, she could still remember how to make. She had packed the cookies inside a dusty uncleaned goldfish bowl. But she could still not remember the baby’s name after Saul and Patsy had told her three times, and before she left, she said music from somewhere still went through her head, Puccini and Mozart, but she could not remember whether the hour of the day was morning or afternoon, and she was going to have to move herself into a place where there were nurses and people who helped you eat dinner and told you the time. She would not be able to sing arias from opera, once there; she was sure of that. Emory and Anne McPhee gave Patsy a gallon of homemade potato salad preserved in Tupperware; Anne was pregnant again, she said, and couldn’t stay. Harry and Lucia Edmonds, who had worked with Patsy at the bank, brought over a pair of pink baby pajamas, complete with footies, that Lucia had bought at the new outlet mall. Gary Krochock, their neighbor and their insurance agent, also Jewish, dropped off a box of cigars. Mad Dog Bettermine, who had left his girlfriend at home because, he told Saul over the phone, he didn’t want her to get any big ideas about babies and his own potential for fatherhood, grew unexpectedly abashed at the sight of Mary Esther. Having hauled a case of discount no-name beer onto the front porch, he stood quietly over the crib, wordless from baby-fear, staring at Mary Esther, and he could not move until Patsy picked up Mary Esther and Saul took Mad Dog by the arm and guided him out of the room.

  Saul removed him to the small back den, gave him a cigar, and from there the two men retired to the back stoop, lighting up and drinking, belching smoke, somehow unable to make conversation. Mad Dog had an odd expression on his face. Saul would have liked to talk to him but didn’t know how. He would have said that fatherhood was great, terrifying, too, of course, but you could handle the terror by imagining yourself having been invited to a large noisy and sloppy party where all the guests made uproar and messes—this was parenthood. Only he didn’t quite believe it was as festive as all that.

  But charity was everywhere. Saul had never seen anything like it. Saul’s mother- and father-in-law, Susan and Dick Carlson, arrived after Saul’s mother had left, and they slept in the living room, Susan on the sofa, Dick in a sleeping bag on the floor, during the three days of their visit. Patsy was their only child. During their time in the house, they cooked and cleaned and talked in whispers, like servants. In their quietness, Saul thought they compared favorably to his mother, but they were eerie in their placid and muted operations. They enjoyed companionable and friendly silences—as Delia did not—interrupted by the occasional and characteristic cry of “Here, let me do that.” They said they loved the baby, and Patsy’s mother held Mary Esther with great tenderness, kissing her on the forehead each time she lifted her up and cradled her in her arms and rocked her.

  They were sweet to Saul in an airy and distant way, as if they liked the idea of him a bit more than the actuality, and they took great care to defer to him as long as they were in the house: Where were the spare lightbulbs, they would ask, instead of just looking for them. Saul noticed that they often gazed at his hands when they were speaking to him, as if he were about to break into sign language. They treated him like a lovable Martian—and seemed pleased with themselves for being able to love such a creature. “Just you relax,” they often said to him.

  After Patsy’s parents departed, Saul could hardly remember that they had been present in the house at all, they removed the traces of themselves so thoroughly. They left no scent behind; they just vanished. His in-laws took an odd sort of pride, in a Protestant way he couldn’t quite pinpoint, in being nearly invisible. They didn’t want anyone to remember that they had ever been anywhere or had been sighted, like rare
birds. Some sort of prideful modesty or humility on their part made them withdraw from the footlights in an effort at self-erasure, and it was rather starchy and New England of them. With their mild, quiet voices and their agreeable manner, they didn’t try to assert claims of ownership over Patsy, as his mother certainly would have over him. He tried to remember their faces, Susan’s hair graying in beautiful streaks and Dick’s halfhearted smile, her reading glasses and his Rolex, but all he managed to keep in his head were bits and pieces of their appearance, as if they had evaporated somehow, keeping their souls unviolated and intact and completely private. That was their selfishness, if you wanted to think ill of them. They had no character that they would share. They were charitable with their actions but gave you nothing of themselves, and when they were gone, they were gone for good. All they left behind was a sterling silver teething cup with Mary Esther’s name engraved on it.