“Responsible? Wait a minute. What do they say?”
“Come on, Matt,” Anne McPhee called out. “Hey, what’s your baby boy’s name gonna be?”
“Theo,” Patsy said. “What do they say, Anne? Tell me.”
“They say you’re cursed. Outcasts of God. Now that’s small-minded. No kidding, Patsy, I’d go talk to Brenda Bagley if I were you. You got some unfinished business over there.”
Driving to Brenda Bagley’s house, Patsy had the disagreeable sensation that Gordy Himmelman was sitting in the backseat, ruminating over his life and the stray impulse that had ended it—just there, slumped beside Emmy, making a minor ectoplasmic pest of himself, unseatbelted, more alive now that he was dead than he had been when he happened to be living. That was his way, his particular posthumous style. She thought she smelled for a fraction of a second the characteristic Gordy scent of pickles and wet dog. Okay, so he was back there. He was like a dog: he always enjoyed riding in cars, hanging around on the front lawn, waiting for a project.
Waiting for a head-pat. As a ghost he was probably harmless. Funny: weeks and weeks ago, after she and Saul had made love, Saul had abruptly said that he wanted to have a dog, but Patsy wasn’t going to get one, not with Emmy around and a new baby coming. Maybe having Gordy would satisfy Saul. Maybe not.
Coming to an unfamiliar street corner, she recognized that she was lost. Because of the city’s loose zoning laws, low property taxes, and the we-won’t-enforce-anything environmental understandings, Five Oaks’s industrial area had grown rapidly on the south side of the city in the early 1980s, and then, with the move to globalization, had declined just as rapidly. The streets were laid out in rosette and slipknot patterns. Boom and bust cycles happened so fast in the city these days that factories were closed months after they had opened; only the chemical plants were still holding their own down by the river, still profitable, still toxic. Now as Patsy tried to figure out where she was, she spotted the Hawkeye plant for school-bus frames to her right—the frames piled like steel skeletal remains near a loading dock. New as it was, the plant was about to close and move to Mexico. Or Honduras. Some damn place where they would work for ten cents an hour. Negotiations were still continuing. The closing of the factory had been major news in the papers, and as a bank officer, Patsy had to keep up with the latest statistics concerning the city’s economic infrastructure and indebtedness. Workers were losing their pensions and their savings and were being advised to move to the South-west. The whole neighborhood had a clammy out-of-work dinge to it. Sooty warehouses that had gone from youth to old age without anything in between were located here, next to parking lots and solitary clapboardexterior bars named The Wooden Keg and The Shipwreck, with their quietly slumped clientele visible through the front windows.
The Chevy advanced under a sequence of darkened streetlights, and Patsy found herself in a blind alley. As she backed up and turned around, her headlights caught sight of three kids out on the sidewalk, three Himmel middle schoolers fooling around in the early dusk: bleached skin, bleached faces. Just like albinos, Patsy thought, putting the car into drive and accelerating. She shouldn’t have brought Emmy along on this errand, she thought, but after all, it was an emergency.
The street ahead of her extended and contracted in a kind of daze, prolonging itself and then foreshortening in a visual pattern associated with the vertigo that accompanies anxiety, but then, maybe what she was seeing and feeling was just a side effect of the Dorylaeum she was taking, those strange red-and-blue pills that came accompanied with the long sheet of warnings. The car accelerated into a pool of buttery light.
She drove past a parked car with a cracked windshield and a wire coat-hanger in place of the radio antenna. On the car’s bumper was a small sticker whose words had been printed with purple ink:
I’m so gothic
I’m already dead.
After she had found her way back to Strewwelpeter Street, she made quick progress to Brenda Bagley’s manufactured house. Saul had taken her past here twice during one of his obsessive weeks following Gordy’s death, and the house had a strange unmistakable individualized dreariness, easy to locate. You could spot it in a crowd of manufactured homes. Most of them were cheerful and simple, but an air of indescribable gloom hung over Brenda Bagley’s. It appeared to have been constructed out of stale, brittle candy left over from an unsuccessful birthday party: its exterior white vinyl siding looked like hardened cake frosting decorated with tiny highlighted splotches of chocolate mud. Moths threw themselves toward the exterior door light and then fell, burned and wounded, to the pavement. At the same time, the two front windows, facing the street, with their half-lowered windowshades, had the momentary appearance of hooded eyes examining her as she approached them. It was like the House of Usher in a trailer park.
She drew Emmy out of her child seat in the back, leaving Gordy Himmelman’s spirit-remains still there—if he wanted to follow her in, he would, but she doubted it—and, a few moments later, with her daughter in her arms, Patsy rang the bell of Brenda Bagley’s house. From inside she heard the happy cries of a singing television commercial. The doorbell tolled out in three tones, and its song was followed by a rumpus-like clatter of dishes and silverware. The door opened, and Brenda Bagley peered out through the gap.
“Brenda,” Patsy said. “It’s me. Patricia Bernstein. Patsy. You know, Saul’s wife.”
“Sure,” Brenda muttered, exhaling cigarette smoke as she nodded. Her florid face examined Patsy and Mary Esther. Brenda’s eyes were still red-rimmed. “Of course. What brings you here, Patsy?”
“May I come in for a minute? I have to talk to you. It’ll only take a second. I just couldn’t do it over the phone.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Brenda Bagley said. “But it’s kind of a mess in here. So it’s not a good time for visiting impromptu like you’re doing. Well, come in anyway.”
She opened the door, and Patsy followed her, carrying Emmy inside her left arm. Her daughter seemed to be getting heavier by the minute and reactively cried out with grief or shock, once she was inside, from the effect of the stale cigarette smoke and the squalor. On the other side of the living area, a gigantic television set facing the doorway enjoyed a regal presence, except that a dinner plate with crusted food rested on its uppermost flat surface, reducing its dignity. The TV had a screen that was too large for the home’s interior, and its volume had been set so high that it was hard to hear or even to see anything else in proximity to it. The chairs and side tables and lamps appeared to be dwarfed by the huge electronic apparatus. Patsy wondered how they had managed to get the TV in here. Its size seemed so gargantuan that it could not have been squeezed through the doorway—the enormous television set in the tiny living room had the visual effect of a clipper ship assembled piece by piece inside a glass bottle. Patsy had the momentary feeling that the smoky room was airless, or the air so thoroughly consumed that it would not sustain life. The television set had used up most of the oxygen, and the remaining air had acquired a blue smoky tint from Brenda Bagley’s cigarettes. It was positively industrial. Bunched-up pieces of facial tissue littered the floor. Had the woman been crying, alone, in the evenings, with the TV set on, thinking of Gordy Himmelman?
Just to the left of the door was a sofa on whose cushion a white cat slept nestled against a plain plastic box.
“I’ll turn that off,” Brenda Bagley said, reaching for the remote. She pressed a button, and the screen at once went dark with an angry static crackling, as if the beast had been told to start hibernating or had been hit with a stun gun. “I can tell what you’re thinking—you think it’s a big TV. That’s what everyone thinks. And you’re right. It is big. I won it at the State Fair, is why.”
“You won it?”
“I guessed at the number of marbles in a jar. They had this little booth for an appliance store, and I’ve always been good at guessing things like that ever since I was a girl. I’ve won staplers and telephones. This time, t
he prize was that thing. They couldn’t downscale it, they said. That was the one they had to give away because they advertised that particular model. They had to take the door frame off my house to get it in here.” She seemed to lose her train of thought. “I should’ve traded it for a smaller one. It’s a mess in here,” she said, glancing up in a vague manner. What appeared to be coffee stains dotted the ceiling tile. Perhaps the coffee had spilled upward. Perhaps the laws of gravity did not operate successfully here.
“It isn’t a mess in here at all,” Patsy said evasively, to be polite. She looked toward the television set and saw herself reflected in its dark, blank, sleeping screen.
“Nice of you to say,” Brenda noted. “Please sit down, won’t you? You must be tired out carrying that little one around.”
Patsy lowered herself and the still-crying Emmy onto the sofa on the opposite side from the white cat and the box. The cat, annoyed by the child’s noise, jumped off and away toward the kitchen. Emmy needed a diaper change and was being fussy. Patsy plugged her mouth with a pacifier.
Patsy could feel the words she wished to say making their way up her throat, but they seemed to stop before they could quite get out. While she waited, she studied a picture on the wall near the doorway to the kitchen where the cat had retreated, and she bounced Emmy in her lap. The photograph was a studio portrait of some man and Gordy: sitting in the man’s lap, Gordy was much younger, just a toddler in the picture, not that much older than Emmy was now, and he smiled a toothy, dimwitted smile. Emmy continued to fuss and to reach for Patsy’s breast, but Patsy had stopped breastfeeding and, in any case, wouldn’t have opened her bra to Emmy’s mouth in front of Brenda Bagley if the world had depended on it. Some free-floating malice in this room wouldn’t permit that physical openness, some starveling bitterness that permeated the walls and the air.
“Brenda,” Patsy said. “I just talked to somebody I know. Knew. Well, it doesn’t matter when I knew her. She said that people—you know, parents—are starting to blame Saul and me for Gordy’s death, and they’re blaming us for Sam Cole’s death, too, and now this Himmel craze that the middle schoolers have taken up.”
“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s trying to look like Gordy. Isn’t that something? He’s a star.”
“That’s right. And she said I should talk to you.”
“Why?”
“She said people are blaming us. Saul and me.”
“Oh, are they? For what?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing. For Gordy? For Sam? Why would they blame us?”
“You’re asking me? What would I have to do with it?”
“Well,” Patsy said, “she said I should ask you. She said we had unfinished business with you. She said I should come here right away.”
“I just go to work, and then I come home, Patsy. I’m a waitress, you know, at the Fleetwood. It’s not like I circulate.”
“I know.”
“All I do is sometimes talk to the customers. Look at him over there,” Brenda Bagley said, aiming her face at the photograph. “There he is, Gordy, with his dad. Only picture the two of them ever took together.”
“It must have been hard, trying to be his mother and dad, just you alone with him here.”
“Yeah, well,” Brenda Bagley said.
“What was his name?” Patsy asked. “The father?”
“Rufus. Rufus Himmelman. I thought you knew. People called him Rowdy for a while. Then they called him Ray. He had aliases. Names didn’t stick to him. Ray, Rick, Rob—he went through a lot of the R names. He could have been anything, I guess.” She waited. “But what he really was, was a con,” she said quickly. “He needed different names in his lines of work.”
“How come you took over the care of Gordy?” Patsy asked.
“It’s a long story. With the mother dead in that fire, somebody had to do it.”
“It doesn’t make sense,” Patsy said suddenly. “His father leaving and not coming back or asking about him. Disappearing like that. Then you, being Gordy’s guardian.”
“Oh, you think it doesn’t make sense?” Brenda Bagley stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and promptly lit another one. She gave Patsy a broad and very angry smile. Patsy waited for the Big Speech that usually follows the angry smile in the movies. But often there is no Big Speech and no explanation, just the angry smile, which then subsides as the cigarette rises to the mouth, and smoke is inhaled and exhaled. Not everyone had the resources of instant articulation. Once again, Patsy saw herself and her daughter and Brenda Bagley reflected on the blank TV screen, though they didn’t look like people on TV but like themselves: a toddler needing a diaper change, a frazzled woman with a cigarette, and an anxious and pregnant young mother. Then Brenda Bagley said, “Men leave their children all the time for parts unknown, you know, and they don’t come back for years, if they come back. Well, I don’t care. Maybe it don’t make any sense, but I took over the boy’s raising anyway. Nobody and nothing was offering to marry me. Didn’t have a boyfriend back then, or now either, and no children of my own to attend to, so I thought: he’s the only one I’ll ever get. Gordy will be mine. You see this face?”
She meant her own. Of course Patsy saw it. It was right in front of her, staring at her like a peeled tangerine with eyes. She nodded.
“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: With a face like that, no man would marry her. You know, nobody in my life ever called me ‘pretty.’ That’s a word I only heard about. I heard it applied to the other girls and then to the women I knew, but I sure never heard it applied to me. Bad skin all my life, and nothing the doctors could do. Dermatologists! Everybody said, ‘Oh, Brenda, she’s so polite and kindly,’ and then they’d go off behind my back and say that my face looked like the craters of the moon. Soon as somebody’s down, they start kicking at her just for the fun of it. And now here you come around, asking this and that, as if you got the right.”
Patsy sat silent while Emmy continued to squirm, arching her back. She was crying quietly. Gathering her wits, Patsy said, “That wasn’t what I wanted to inquire about. It was all these children, trying to look like Gordy. And the blame for what happened to Sam Cole.”
“What do you think I have to do with them?” Brenda asked. “You think I’m giving them orders? You can’t give a child orders. Well, you can, but it’s a joke.”
“No. It’s just . . . have you been saying things about Saul and me? Anne McPhee said we were outcasts of God.”
“Are you? Didn’t know that God cared that much. Well, that’s just her opinion. I don’t know as I’ve said that.”
“People listen to you.”
“People certainly don’t listen to me.”
“Oh, I’m sure they do.”
“They never have. You think I have any influence with anybody? Where’d you get that idea?”
“Anne McPhee,” Patsy repeated.
“What does she know about outcasts of God?”
“I don’t know what she knows,” Patsy said, feeling as if her time was up.
“I’m the expert on outcasts of God,” Brenda Bagley said huffily, and with an odd touch of snobbery. “I’ve got everyone beat on that score.”
“Would you do me a favor, then?” Patsy asked. “Would you please tell people that Saul and I had nothing to do with Gordy’s death? We didn’t do it, we didn’t influence it, we’re sorry it happened, we’re miserable about it—can you say that, please, if people start asking?” She did not mention that Gordy’s ghost was, at this very moment, sitting in the car, waiting. The time was not right for a revelation of that sort.
“I guess I could say that if you want me to,” Brenda Bagley muttered, as if she was thinking about something else. “If anyone cares to know. I might mention it. But I want you to come see something first.”
“What?”
“Gordy’s bedroom.” She stood up without warning, then clumped down the narrow hallway in the opposite direction from the kitchen. After a pause, she
made a windmilling motion for Patsy to follow her. Patsy picked up Mary Esther, who seemed to be watching something floating invisibly in the air in front of her, and carried her into Gordy’s bedroom.
The room smelled of boy-mildew and had one overhead light. On the north wall Gordy had cut out and pasted up, with adhesive tape, magazine photos of soldiers in camouflage clothing, holding their guns. They were walking through jungles. They were crawling through rice paddies and marshes. They had determined and brave killer expressions on their faces. In other pictures they were firing their guns or shouting the war shout as they plunged into battle. Movie stars dressed as soldiers were among them. It was standard stuff. So were the cartoons of superheroes cut out and pasted next to them. Near these pictures was a small poster of Wolverine, the superhero, the X-man, with his razor fingers, and another one of the same guy, in rage-against-the-world mode, beast mode. Patsy wondered why, if Gordy couldn’t read, he had all these comic-book figures pasted onto his bedroom wall.
“He loved Wolverine,” Brenda Bagley said.
Patsy felt herself indeliberately startle. In the midst of all this warfare and welter was a photo of Mary Esther as a small baby, the one with her leaning against the back of the sofa, her stuffed gnome in her lap. It was the picture that Saul had handed out in class. She rested there, an illustration of a baby, among the soldiers and superheroes and archvillains.
Patsy was finding it difficult to breathe.
“People said he couldn’t read,” Brenda Bagley was saying, “but he sat in here with those comic books of his, and the other magazines, X-men and so on, and I sure thought he was doing something, and if it wasn’t reading, I don’t know what it was.”
Also on the wall above the headboard was a picture of a beehive. Good Christ, the sadness of things.
Saul and Patsy Page 24
