Saul and Patsy

by Charles Baxter

  The collective judgment was that Gordy Himmelman had taken a tragic interest in guns. He had never been properly trained in their use. He played with guns to give himself a feeling of power—to compensate for his poor work at school and for his social failures. The suicide had certain aspects of an accident. Like other troubled youths, especially impulsive young men, Gordy Himmelman had, tragically—his voice once again dropped an octave—taken the easy way out. A life had been snuffed, like a candle’s flame, but after the inquiries so far it appeared to have been nobody’s fault, the superintendent had repeated. “Mistakes were made,” he said, “but we cannot say who made them. Let’s say that we all made them. And let’s go on from there. We can’t dwell forever in the past. The past,” he said, “is a canceled check. We expect never to have another incident like this in Five Oaks. Therefore, we have invited Jane Henderson to help us out.”

  The psychiatric social worker, Jane Henderson, who had been brought in from Holbein College, carried her coffee cup to the podium. She was a brisk and efficient woman in her late thirties. Saul thought she had the hardened professionalism of a business consultant: the glaring half-smile, the chignon, the pitiless rules of thumb, the overenunciated words combined with common sense set out in formulated phrases. She assured the audience that teen suicides were terrible tragedies and, furthermore, that they were now epidemic. Terrible as Gordy’s death was, however, it was important to recognize that it had been one of many such suicides all across the United States, each one of them tragically preventable. Saul noticed that the word “tragic” was cropping up repeatedly, compulsively, though no one really meant it or felt it. “I am sorry to report to you,” she said, “that your community is only the latest to have suffered from this terrible plague. What can we do? We can do something. We can empower ourselves. We can watch for signs of trouble.” She then listed, using a PowerPoint demonstration, the ten warning signs of a tragically troubled teen—including clothing signs, verbal signs, gestural signs, the closed doors, the sullenness, the touchiness in response to questions. Gordy had exhibited four and one-half of these signs. He could have been spotted and helped out; at the very least, he could have been given counseling and, perhaps, medication.

  “You have to be alert,” Jane Henderson said. “These events can precipitate into a contagion in a community like ours.”

  Saul sat with his head in his hands. You couldn’t answer human disorder like Gordy’s with PowerPoint demonstrations. He now wished he had never brought those baby pictures into his remedial-reading class.

  Harold reported to Saul that Gordy’s death was the biggest and sometimes the only topic of conversation in the barbershop, and the talk often implicated Saul and Patsy, but ambiguously and circularly, and only because they had been standing nearby in the house when Gordy’s gun went off in the front yard. What had he been doing on their lawn, in front of that tree? What had he been doing there, off and on, all that year? No one could explain. It was mystifying, and Saul knew that his and Patsy’s proximity to Gordy’s death would mark them as accessories to the mystification.

  The boy hadn’t previously threatened to kill himself or anyone else. He had displayed the gun the way other boys displayed their baseball cards. There had been no desperate spoken ultimatums. He hadn’t seemed particularly unhappy; he wasn’t atypical, unless you counted his attention deficits. As the days went on, Saul thought that Gordy had fired a bullet into his brain on a whim. MAD IN AMERICA . . . that was Gordy all over, committing suicide as a weirdly unpromising practical joke. Or: he had performed an auto-jihad. Even Bob Pawlak had no explanation. “Total surprise to me,” he said, shrugging. The autopsy turned up no drugs or alcohol in Gordy’s bloodstream. The other possibility, of a genuine despair, was somehow unthinkable in Gordy’s case. Certainly the gun itself wasn’t to blame. Was it? In any case, after the medical examiner’s autopsy, there was no funeral and no memorial service and no reminiscences about the boy. Gordy’s family couldn’t afford a funeral, his aunt had said (really, since no one except the aunt wanted to acknowledge him as kin, there was no family), and no one had much of anything to remark about Gordy’s life, such as it had been. What could you say about him? Like God, he was who he was. He was close to invisible, and then he had erased the only visibility he had. She said she would just scatter his ashes out in back of the trailer where he had lived. When Saul began to inquire over the telephone about this economizing, Gordy’s aunt asked him: What about Gordy, did he think, was worth remembering? He was better off held back in the past without anybody creating too much of a fuss over him now, she said. It occurred to Saul that Gordy’s aunt thought that suicides were shameful and that she had to get rid of him in a hurry. When she used those school words, “held back,” Saul felt himself shiver, as if someone’s fingers soaked in ice water were traveling down his spine. “No use crying over that boy anymore, no earthly use that I can see,” she said, in a call she made to Saul on a Saturday afternoon. “I’ve cried enough. Leave him be, resting in peace. Don’t you want him to rest in peace?”

  The child Cossack, he thought, my adversary, he deserved better than this.

  “Yes,” he said. “Only it makes me angry that he killed himself.”

  “Angry?”

  “Sure. I get mad when I think about it.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t get mad about it,” she said. “I wouldn’t get riled up.” Saul didn’t have the impression that she really wanted to talk to him anymore; her voice had a smoky flaring-up and fading-back. She went on talking in her dazed way. “You aren’t responsible or anything. I’m not going to sue you or anybody else, is what I’m saying,” she said. “Despite what some people have been suggesting to me. Don’t you worry about that. I’m not going after your money now. Besides, I already thanked you for your generosity.”

  Saul knew better than to respond, especially about money. After taking another breath, Brenda Bagley said that she was sorry that she hadn’t hidden the gun any better than she had. Gordy had found it squirreled away in a shoe box in her closet, where she had thought he’d never find it.

  On the afternoon following this conversation, he and Brenda Bagley drove to the Five Oaks Funeral Home and picked up Gordy’s ashes in a plastic box. The funeral director, Lewis Binch, was an affable man in a pinstriped suit, perfectly tailored; his eyes were alert and searching in an Irish manner—the entire face displayed a resigned, comic intelligence as he sat behind his desk in his office, offering good-humored consolation. He seemed well acquainted with grief and was not frightened of it. Saul wondered how he hadn’t met this funeral director before; he wanted him as a friend and took his business card, hoping for another occasion to meet prior to a death, especially his own.

  The box of ashes was as big as a dictionary, and its contents rattled; Saul estimated its weight at about twelve pounds. After driving Brenda Bagley back home, he carried the box into her trailer, following her. As soon as she was inside, she turned on the enormous television set and stood for a moment to see what programs were on. “You can put it over there,” she said, pointing to a sofa on which a white cat slept, while she watched the TV screen, as an old sea captain would watch a lighthouse. Saul laid the box of ashes on the sofa opposite the cat. He left without saying goodbye, while she went on watching the TV screen, avoiding shipwreck, though she waved absentmindedly as he walked out the door.

  After the summer storms and the articles about Gordy’s death in the Five Oaks News-Chronicle, accompanied by a lengthy and hard-hitting editorial about troubled children and guns, and the terrible inexplicable epidemic of student violence in American schools, Patsy went to her OB-GYN and confirmed what she already knew, that she was newly pregnant. She did not say that Gordy’s death had inspired the two of them to create this child; some things you didn’t have to tell Saul.

  When she informed Saul that night at dinner about her pregnancy, he stood up at the table and walked over to where she sat to kiss her and hug her. His joy was manufactured
for her benefit—she could instantly tell— but manufactured joy was better than none at all, and she admired his efforts to be glad on her behalf. He himself would be glad spontaneously, in time. His feelings needed some duration to establish themselves on whatever solid ground Saul might find.

  The stain of Gordy’s blood on the linden wouldn’t wash off: Saul had tried soapsuds and Clorox, sponging the bark of the tree, until it came to him that he was being just like Gordy’s aunt, trying to wash all traces of him away, and he stopped.

  For a week after that he watched television. It was like taking a bath in forgetfulness. Whatever they had on television wasn’t good or bad: it was just television. If you put a Vermeer on television, it stopped being a Vermeer and turned into something else on television.

  Sometimes he watched with Mary Esther perched in his lap. He combed her hair idly, shook her music-box teddy bear, bounced her, fed her, read Pat the Bunny, and sang “Little Red Caboose” to her when the mood struck him. He began to hope for certain commercials to reappear, the ones with happy tunes. Whenever she fussed, he carried her around the house and then outside. He did not sleep consistently at night. He wasn’t unhappy, nor was he depressed; he just wasn’t anything—this was how he explained it to himself. He was preoccupied by a certain variety of nothingness, full of colors and moods. It was a kingdom, and he had just made his respectful way through the front gate. Patsy stayed up with him as long as she could, holding his hand, and then she went to bed.

  It made no sense to try to love one’s enemy when the enemy was already dead. It was a stupid spiritual practice, and Christian, besides.

  After enduring another week of this, Patsy came downstairs one morning and told Saul that he should take a trip somewhere, anywhere, just for a few days, to let the miles soak up in him. He needed to travel, to watch the telephone poles fly by in their sedative manner. It wasn’t that she wanted him out of the house; she just thought that he needed to get away. He didn’t hunt or fish—he didn’t have any of those male outdoorsy escape valves—but he could at least go to one or two cities and visit the museums. That would be a nice Saul thing to do, she said, before school started again and he found himself extemporizing in one classroom or another. She could manage Mary Esther on her own for a few days.

  Following her advice, he called ahead to a few friends and then packed several days’ worth of clean clothes. He didn’t like to fly because airport terminals and their long receding concourses reminded him of gigantic vacuum-cleaner hoses sucking him and everyone else into nullity. He preferred taking the train.

  At the doors of the Detroit Amtrak station he leaned into the car and kissed Patsy and Mary Esther goodbye. He took the train to Washington on a coach ticket he had bought on the Web. He arrived at Union Station three hours late. For two nights he stayed with a couple he knew, Buzz Henselt and his girlfriend, Sarah. The two of them lived in a walkup near Cleveland Heights in the District and were doing moderately well— Sarah worked for a writers-in-the-schools project, and Buzz, who was good at budget analysis, had landed a job in the Department of Transportation—but Saul realized that he was in a fog and wasn’t keeping up his end of the conversation, particularly when Buzz and Sarah asked him about himself and Patsy and Mary Esther. All he could say was, “Oh, we’re fine,” before lapsing into silence and staring at their Edward Hopper poster (the house, not the nighthawks) framed on the living-room wall, or the Ralston Crawford poster in the dining room. He realized that his presence there was a puzzle to them. He was an inexplicable and unsatisfying guest. He wasn’t terribly interested in them anymore and answered their questions as if he were talking about someone else or taking a quiz, and, no, as it turned out, he didn’t want to go to the National Gallery.

  He slept on a cot in their study, close enough to the computer so that he could hear its internal fan whirring all night in sleep mode, almost covering the sounds of Buzz and Sarah’s snoring and snorts and conversations in the next room. Still childless, they hadn’t yet learned how to muffle themselves. In the corner, Buzz and Sarah’s African gray parrot, Jack, muttered and scrabbled about in his cage. The bird had acquired a fiendish expertise for imitating ringing telephones and dripping faucets, and in moments of bravado would imitate Sarah’s asthma wheeze, allergy-related coughing, and gasps during intercourse. “Shut up,” Saul would say, and within hours the bird started to answer, “Shut up.”

  At breakfast, Buzz asked Saul whether there wasn’t something he— Saul—wanted to talk about, and Saul shook his head. “I’m sort of in this box, and I can’t exactly open it up, but I’m okay,” he said. “That’s all. It’s not serious. Don’t worry about me.” He went back to his bagel and the sports page. He didn’t mention Gordy Himmelman, feeling that it would be an imposition. Too long living in the Midwest had made him a practitioner of self-effacing obtuse cheerfulness, he realized.

  Finally, after calling to make sure she’d be there, he borrowed Buzz and Sarah’s car and drove over to Bethesda to his mother’s house. He had grown up in this house and was happy to think of it as no longer his, or as home, or as a place where he would willingly stay for more than a few hours at a time. Standing on the sidewalk, Saul inspected the lawn and the front garden: they were carefully tended, the edges of the grass properly clipped, the lilac at the side of the house perfectly trimmed, the geranium in its pot on the front stoop well-watered. Pansies filled the flower bed. Somebody was indeed taking care of his mother, or of her lawn, lush and green as it was—prodigal and green and carnal, in its second adolescence, pubic, procreative. After he rang the doorbell, the door opened, and his mother presented herself. “Ah, the weary traveler. You like it?” his mother asked, glancing around at nothing in particular. That was Delia: she had always asked him questions that were too vague to answer.

  Saul smiled at her and shrugged. “Very much.” Carrying his overnight bag, he ambled up to her and hugged her.

  On close inspection, he could see that something had indeed happened to her. Delia was not herself anymore. She had been divested of her affectations and stripped of her usual ornaments. He had prepared himself for more of her mustard-gas perfume, more girlishness, a bonanza of bracelets and amber necklaces, but she wasn’t wearing any bracelets or necklaces, she had stopped dyeing her hair, and she had done away with the bloody-looking fingernail polish. She just stood there, wearing a new simplicity. She was almost elegant. “Sweetie,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “It’s good to see you. I’m so sorry about that boy. Put your suitcase inside in the foyer and let’s go to the supermarket. We need some groceries for dinner.”

  Behind the wheel of his mother’s Camry, negotiating traffic, his newly remodeled mother beside him, Saul suddenly remembered why he disliked the suburbs and had developed an affection for dusty, luckless midwestern cities tucked away inside the folds of the map. The drivers here in suburban Maryland were cunning and ruthless. They engaged in savage tailgating. They were overachieving supervisors in their professional lives and now they were doing their best to overachieve behind the wheel. They wore their successes on their huge muscular sheet-metal fenders. Darwinian, emotionally Republican even if they were registered Democrats, they had acquired German sedans or American SUVs that looked like staff cars for Rommel, or they had huge spotless V-8 pickup trucks with nothing, ever, in the cargo bed—that would spoil the effect, like a suntan that ended at the shirt collar—and most of them drove with one hand, the other hand on their cell phones relaying news to the home-front on how the battle was going. Domestic life in the suburbs, simple trips to the mall, had shifted to a war footing, the drivers so high and mighty behind the wheel that they looked down on any sedan inhabited by civilians.

  At the green light, when Saul failed to accelerate immediately, the woman behind him, driving a burgundy F-250, honked at him, and Saul flashed her the finger and began yelling helplessly and with great enraged enthusiasm. She zoomed past him in the left lane, lowered the passenger-side electric window, sho
uted “Dickhead!” at him, and raced forward. On her truck’s bumper there was a diversity-rainbow sticker. She was very beautiful. He couldn’t chase her: he was driving his mother, his ancient enemy, to the supermarket. Besides, they were underdefended in the Camry, the sort of car driven by worker bees.

  “I wish you’d calm down, Saul,” his mother said a few minutes later, after he had flipped the bird to another driver who had first tailgated him and then cut him off. They entered the parking lot for the supermarket, and Saul began the desperate search for a spot. “You’re awfully tense this morning.” She patted him on the knee. “Why don’t you park over there?” She pointed to a space. Saul ignored her. He parked one row farther off, in an opening that he had found for himself. “I see you’ve acquired a bit of road rage,” Delia said, after he stopped and put on the emergency brake with a furious gesture. “I don’t remember that in you before. Don’t go blaming me for that.”

  “Oh, I would never blame you for anything,” Saul lied, dropping the keys into the pocket of his leather jacket. “It’s the drivers here. And when did I ever have any equanimity? Well, come on.”

  He walked slightly behind her to the doors of the market and noticed how his mother’s physical movements had taken on a pensiveness that she’d never displayed before. It wasn’t an effect of aging; it was the consequence of seriousness, of something profound that had happened to her and had taken root. She most likely couldn’t discuss it with him. Having secrets apparently gave people dignity. Watching her, he felt amazement: his mother had acquired an inner life. She had warmed up. And all from a boy lover. He took her arm as gently as he could, and she smiled at him. “Hi, Saul,” she said, stepping up to the curb, as if he had just arrived. “How are you?”