Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  Bert blamed Beverly for leaving the six children alone on the farm with Ernestine and his parents, for not telling anyone she was taking his mother’s car into Charlottesville to sit through two back-to-back showings of Harry & Tonto. (She hadn’t planned to see it twice, but the theater was so empty and quiet and cool. She had cried at the end of the picture and all through the credits, and rather than walk into the lobby with her mascara running she just decided to stay where she was.) Did he really think she supervised the children every minute? Did he think that had she stayed home that afternoon, after reading another book up in their room, another magazine, taking one more nap, after she had officially died of boredom she might have gone with them to the barn and curried the horses? The truth was she left the children alone in Arlington too, she left them in order to preserve her sanity. At least at the farm there was adult supervision. Did his parents bear no responsibility for what happened on their property? And what about Ernestine? Beverly had left the children in Ernestine’s care even if she hadn’t told Ernestine that’s what she was doing. Ernestine had more parental sense than Beverly and Bert and Bert’s parents all combined, and Ernestine thought it was fine for them to walk the half a mile to the barn.

  Bert should not have insisted that Beverly and the children stay at his parents’ house in the country for the week while he took the station wagon back to Arlington for work. If he thought that the children needed an escort to the barn then he should have stuck around and escorted them himself. Beverly didn’t want to be a guest in his parents’ house. They were forever asking the children about their wonderful mother—How’s Teresa? What’s Teresa doing now? I hope your mother knows she’s always welcome to come and stay with us.

  The children didn’t want to stay with Bert’s parents either. They had been much happier at the Pinecone, where they had stayed in summers past. At Bert’s parents’ house they had to take their shoes off at the back door and wipe their feet with a towel. Because they weren’t allowed in the living room under any circumstances, they had inevitably made a game out of dashing through at top speed on dares whenever they heard someone coming down the hall. A porcelain figurine of an English gentleman and his wolfhound was knocked from an end table and smashed.

  Bert’s parents didn’t want them there. They had made the offer of this extended and highly unusual visit in hopes of seeing their son, not his children or his second wife or her children. But then Bert left.

  Ernestine didn’t want them there. She couldn’t have. It meant eight extra mouths to feed (seven after Bert decamped), piles of laundry, games to invent, fights to break up, employers to soothe. The load fell heaviest on Ernestine’s shoulders and yet she alone carried her burden without complaint.

  Bert went back to Arlington because under the circumstances of a normal work week it was expensive, impractical, and stimulatingly dangerous to find a place to continue his affair with his paralegal. Linda Dale (two first names; she did not answer to Linda) said for once she would like to have dinner together in a restaurant like regular people, go to bed in a real bed, wake up in the middle of the night and make love while they were still half asleep, and then do it again in the shower the next morning. Bert was not crazy about Linda Dale, she was petulant and demanding and very young, but she talked like this on the phone when he called the office, so what was he supposed to do? Stay at the farm?

  He was in the office when his mother called to tell him about Cal. He jumped in his car and broke every speed limit, making the two-hour drive to the hospital in Charlottesville in just under one and a half like any parent would do. There wasn’t time to go home and straighten up the house. He never thought of it.

  Sometimes it was hard for Beverly and Bert to remember what had destroyed them. When Beverly wept over the affair, the unfamiliar red panties surfacing in her unmade bed, Bert was aghast. The death of a child trumped infidelity. The death of a child trumped everything. It was a logic Beverly could nearly embrace. If pain and loss could be ranked then surely Bert had won and this was the time for them to pull together, for the sake of their marriage, or their remaining children. But accepting the circumstances didn’t turn out to be the same as forgiveness. They bound themselves together with a little tape and soldiered on, and even though their marriage held for nearly six years after Cal’s death, neither of them would remember it that way. They would say that their separate griefs had broken them apart much earlier.

  If the end of Beverly and Bert’s marriage could not rightfully be attributed to Cal, neither could it be pinned on Albie, though the couple’s emotional resources were so depleted by the time Albie arrived from California that he didn’t have to do much of anything but watch them go over the cliff. The mere fact that he had come turned out to be enough. Five years, two months, and twenty-seven days after Cal died, Albie had dropped a lit book of matches in the trash can of the art room of Shery High, in Torrance. Teresa called Bert and told him about the fire, told him through her exhausted tears that Albie was being held in Juvenile. Bert hung up and had Beverly call her ex-husband to get the kid out. With that behind them, Bert called Teresa back to tell her what an incompetent parent she was. Saturday morning and she didn’t even know where their only son had gone to on his bike? He told her the home she provided was unfit, unsafe, and she had no choice but to send Albie to him. Bert had this conversation on the phone in the kitchen where Beverly was sautéeing onions to start a Stroganoff for dinner. She turned off the fire beneath the pan and walked slowly up the stairs to Caroline’s bedroom. She often hid in Caroline’s room now that her older daughter had gone to college. Bert never thought to look for her there.

  Of course there were many things Teresa could have volleyed back, but at the heart of her ex-husband’s bombastic cruelty was one simple truth: she couldn’t keep Albie safe. She didn’t necessarily think Bert could do it either, but different friends, a different school, the other side of the country, might afford Albie a better chance. On Monday morning the principal called to say that Albie and the other boys were suspended pending investigation, and if the investigation found them guilty (which was likely considering they had been seen running out of the burning building on a Saturday morning and had confessed to starting the fire) they would be expelled. On Tuesday she called Bert back. She was putting Albie on a plane.

  Albie, nearly fifteen, walked as far as the back patio, dropped his suitcase, sat down in a white wrought-iron chair, and lit a cigarette. His father was still trying to wrestle the giant sheets of cardboard that had been taped together to form a sort of box around the bicycle from the back of the station wagon. Bert had already told him on the ride in from Dulles that Beverly wouldn’t be home for dinner tonight. On Thursday nights Beverly took a French class at the community college and after that went to dinner with her school friends where they practiced conversational French. “She’s trying to find herself,” his father said, and Albie looked out the window.

  “How is he getting home from the airport then?” Bert had asked her when Beverly announced she wasn’t going to be there. He walked right into that one.

  When he got the bike unwrapped, Bert wheeled it out of the garage like it was Christmas morning. He had meant to say, Look at this! Good as new! but instead he saw the pack of cigarettes and, more distressingly, the red Bic lighter sitting on the table in front of his son. The bike didn’t seem to have a kickstand so he leaned it against one of the patio chairs.

  “You aren’t allowed to have a lighter,” Bert said, though it came out as more of a question than he’d meant it to.

  Albie looked at him, puzzled. “Why not?”

  “Because you burned down your goddamn school. Are you telling me your mother didn’t ground you from fire?”

  Albie smiled at the sheer expansiveness of his father’s stupidity. “I didn’t burn down the school. I set a fire in the art room. It was an accident, and they needed a new art room. The school is already open again.”

  “I’ll say it then: You�
�re grounded from fire. That means no arson and no cigarettes.”

  Albie took a long draw on his cigarette. He turned his head respectfully and blew the smoke to the side. He was respectfully smoking the cigarette outside the house in the first place. “Fire is an element. It’s like water or air.”

  “So you’re grounded from an element.”

  “Can I use the gas stove?”

  They were both looking at the lighter on the table. When Bert reached down to take it Albie swept it into his hand, looking right at him. That was the moment: either Bert would hit his son or he would not. Albie held his cigarette down and lifted his face, eyes wide open. Bert straightened up, stepped back. He had never hit his children. He would not hit them now. The few times he’d ever smacked Cal played in his daydreams on a continuous loop.

  “Don’t smoke in the house,” Bert said, and went inside.

  Albie stared up at the house. It was not the one he’d come to as a child. It wasn’t any house he’d ever seen before. At some point between the last time he was in Virginia and now, Bert and Beverly had moved and failed to mention that fact to Holly or Albie or Jeanette. And why should they, when no one thought that Holly or Albie or Jeanette would ever visit again? But his father hadn’t mentioned the new house at the airport either. Did he forget? Did he think Albie wouldn’t notice? This place was bloodred brick with fluted white columns in the front, a junior relation of the house his grandparents lived in outside Charlottesville. It was heavily landscaped with plants and trees he didn’t recognize, everything orderly and neat. He could see the edge of a swimming pool already covered in tarp for the winter. He could look in the window from the patio and see the kitchen, see the fancy copper pots that hung from a rack on the ceiling, but if he got up and opened the door and walked through the kitchen, he wouldn’t know which way he was supposed to turn. He wouldn’t know what bedroom he was supposed to sleep in.

  Caroline would be off in college by now, and if Albie were to guess he would guess that she had plenty of friends who invited her to their houses for the holidays. She probably had some all-encompassing summer job as a camp counselor or government intern that prevented her from ever coming home or even using a pay phone. Caroline had always made it clear that once she got out of there she wasn’t coming back. Caroline was a bitch by any standard, but she was also the one who had organized all the subversive acts of their childhood summers. She hated them all, especially her own sister, but Caroline got things done. When he thought of her cracking open the station wagon with a coat hanger and getting the gun out of the glove compartment, he shook his head. He had never in his life adored anyone the way he adored Caroline.

  That meant it would just be Franny. He hadn’t seen either of the girls since summer visits to Virginia had stopped five years ago, but Franny was harder for him to fix in his mind. It was weird since she was the person in the family closest to him in age. He remembered that she was always carrying the cat around, and in his memory the girl and the cat had merged: sweet and small, eager to please, quick to nap, always crawling into somebody’s lap.

  Albie stayed on the back patio and smoked while the light turned gold across the suburbs and the cold air pricked his arms. He didn’t want to go in the house and ask his father where he’d be sleeping. He thought about rummaging through his suitcase and finding the generous bag of weed his friends had put together as a going-away present but he figured he’d already pushed the limits of brazenness for one day. It would have been one thing if his lighter were confiscated in a world full of free matchbooks but he didn’t want anyone taking his pot away. He could ride his bike around the new neighborhood, acquaint himself with what was there, but he stayed seated. Thinking about moving was as far as he’d gotten when Franny pulled into the driveway and parked.

  She was wearing a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up and a blue plaid skirt, knee socks, saddle shoes, the universal attire of Catholic school girls. She was skinny and pale with her hair pulled back, and when he stood up and dropped his cigarette he had a split second of uncertainty as to whether or not there was good will between them. Franny dropped her backpack on the ground and came straight to him, arms out. Franny, not understanding that he lived on the other side of a thick wall and so no one could take him into their arms, took him into her arms and squeezed him hard. She was warm and strong and smelled slightly, pleasantly, of girl sweat.

  “Welcome home,” she said. Two words.

  He looked at her.

  “Are they making you stay outside?” she asked, looking down at his suitcase. “Can you at least go in the garage?”

  “I like it out here.”

  Franny looked at the house. The light in Bert’s study was on. “Then we’ll stay out here. What can I get for you? You must be hungry.”

  Albie looked hungry, not only in the unnerving thinness that all the Cousins children possessed, but in his hollow eyes. Albie looked like he could eat an entire pig, python-style, and it wouldn’t begin to address the deficit. “To tell you the truth I could use a drink.”

  “Name it,” Franny said. She was half-turned towards the house, her mind already considering the secret stash of 7-Up her mother disapproved of.

  “Gin.”

  She looked back at Albie and smiled. Gin on a Thursday night. “Did I tell you I’m glad you’re here? Probably not yet. I’m glad you’re here. Are you going to come with me?”

  “I will in a minute,” he said.

  While she was gone Albie looked at the sky. There were animals zipping around up there—sparrows? bats?—along with the near-deafening roar of something cricket-ish. He wasn’t in Torrance anymore.

  In a minute Franny came back with two glasses half-full of ice and gin, a bottle of 7-Up under her arm. She topped off her glass with the soda, used her finger to stir it around, and then looked at him, wagging the 7-Up back and forth.

  “Pass,” he said.

  “Very manly.” They tapped their glasses together the way people did in movies, the way her girlfriends did at slumber parties after siphoning off what could be taken discreetly from the family supply. Franny had had some drinks before, just not at home, not on a school night, not with Albie, but if ever there was a day to break the rules it was today. “Cheers.”

  She made a little face at the taste while Albie just sipped and smiled. He lit another cigarette because it went so nicely with the gin. It felt like they were catching up just sitting there not talking. Too much had happened, too much time had passed, to try putting it into words now.

  After a while Bert came back out. He seemed so happy to see Franny there. He kissed the side of her head, the cloud of cigarette smoke eradicating the smell of gin. “I didn’t know you were home.”

  “Both of us,” Franny said, smiling.

  Bert jingled his car keys. “I’m going to get a pizza.”

  Franny shook her head. “Mom made dinner. It’s all in the fridge. I’ll heat it up.”

  Bert looked surprised, though it would be hard to say why. Beverly always made dinner. He picked up Albie’s suitcase. “You kids come inside now. It’s getting cold out here.”

  The three of them went inside just as the deep darkness of night was setting in. Franny and Albie picked up their glasses, the cigarettes and the lighter, and followed Albie’s father through the door.

  7

  “So Bert Cousins’s kid was the one who broke you and the old Jew up?” Fix said. They were on their way to Santa Monica, the car windows down. They were going to the movies. Caroline was driving. Franny was in the back, leaning forward between the two seats.

  “How have I never heard that part of the story?” Caroline asked.

  “Would you please not call him ‘the old Jew’?” Franny said to her father.

  “Sorry.” Fix covered his heart with his hand. “The old drunk. May God rest his soul in Zion. Hats off to the kid is my point. He’s finally earned my respect.”

  Franny imagined calling Albie with that bit of news
. “It wasn’t like I left the house that night and never went back. We stayed in Amagansett all summer.” There was still Ariel and her intolerable Dutch boyfriend and sad little Button to deal with, the entire long, horrible summer of houseguests to endure. The end of Leo and Franny’s relationship played to a full house. It was more than twenty years ago and still the complete misery of that time was fully accessible to her.

  “But essentially that was that, right?” Fix said. “The kid put the nail in the tire.”

  Caroline shook her head. “Albie identified the fact that the tire had a nail in it,” she said, and Franny, surprised by the accuracy of her sister’s assessment, laughed.

  “I should have stayed in law school,” Franny said. “Then I’d have been as smart as you.”

  Caroline shook her head. “Not possible.”

  “Get over a lane,” Fix said, pointing. “You’re taking a left at the light.” Fix had his Thomas Brothers street guide in his lap. He refused to let Franny put the theater’s address into her phone.

  “Do you have any idea how it could have taken this long to make the movie?” Caroline glanced in the rearview mirror then accelerated deftly to get the better of an oncoming Porsche. As with so many other things in life, Caroline was the superior driver.

  “It happens. Leo wouldn’t sell the film rights so nothing could have started until after he died. I can’t imagine his wife was easy to work with.” Natalie Posen. They were, miraculously, still married when Leo died fifteen years ago, still battling it out. All those years his wife and now his widow. Franny saw her just that one time at the funeral, so much smaller than she would have imagined, sitting in the front row of the synagogue flanked by two sons who looked like Leo—one from the nose up and the other from the nose down—as if each had inherited half his father’s head. Ariel was on the other side of the synagogue with a very grown-up Button and her own mother, the first Mrs. Leon Posen. Eric was listed in the program as an honorary pall bearer, too old himself to lift one sixth of the casket’s weight by that point. He’d been the one to call Franny with the news of Leo’s death, thoughtful considering all the time that had passed. She asked about the next book, the one of the long-ago advance that he was always supposed to be writing. Eric said no, sadly, it wasn’t there.