Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  The two women had lived together for intermittent periods all their lives. They had grown up together, and they squabbled—still squabble—

  in the particular way of people who have grown up together. They stuck it out in the cottage for a winter and part of a spring, but Holly decided at last that she wanted to come back to her native Virginia. She wanted, she said, to live out her final years there. Fiona, not surprisingly, came with her. They sold the cottage for a load of money and came home, where they bought the place on Temporary Road. Holly liked the name of the street. She called it appropriate.

  The house is small but expensive, as all American houses are expensive, but, for a time, things were fine: Holly had the money from the stone cottage and enough from her first marriage to live on interest.

  Years ago, she set up a trust fund for Will, whose income from that affords him the pleasure of running The Heart’s Ease bookstore. Fiona has money of her own, too, but, in her own words, has always been along for the ride with Holly, having never married—having, Fiona would say, never found the right man. Something in her nature always refused to forgive the slightest variant from her ideal, which could be described as a somewhat rosy version of her father, a correct man in all ways, upright and high-minded, public-spirited—and sexless as a tree.

  While it’s clear that the two women wouldn’t be able to function for five minutes without each other, it still happens that they’ll disagree over how much garlic to put in a sauce, and with appalling rapidity this harmless difference will tumble into recriminations concerning offenses, imagined or real, that one or the other committed decades ago. This process happens with all the gathered force and inevitability of the pro-30

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  verbial stone rolling down the hill. And since they have shared everything for most of their lives, really, even during Holly’s marriages, they do not quite know how to be separate. For a while they lived abroad, and life in a foreign country does tend to strengthen the natural bonds people have formed anyway over a lifetime: they were already like sisters. Fiona worked for a travel agency in Brussels, and then in Paris, while Holly wrote travel articles for the London Times. When Holly married her first husband, Fiona moved with them to the U.S. Consulate office in Bangkok; and when the marriage failed, she went along with Holly to Egypt. The first husband, the foreign service official, whose name was Nigel—Holly, telling this, would say, “No kidding”—wanted no children, and in fact he was thirty-five years older than she, and the marriage was doomed, Fiona said, from the start. In Egypt, Holly worked as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Star. Fiona cooked and kept house. Shortly after Holly began to see Tom Butterfield, Fiona traveled alone back to the States and took up residence in a small apartment in Arlington, Virginia, with a view of the Lincoln Memorial across the usually muddy swirl of the Potomac. As a child, Will spent time there while his parents, who had returned one month and six days short of his birth, worked on their fractious marriage. During the first nine years of the boy’s life, there was no chance of Fiona coming to live with them, because Tom Butterfield couldn’t abide her. The separation of the two ladies lasted until Will’s father rejoined the Navy, and set out for Vietnam, though he never got there. He was killed in North Carolina, in a freak accident involving an oxygen tank and a cigarette. He was on guard duty in the oxygen storage barn, and there was a leak in one of the tanks. He lighted a cigarette within five feet of a no smoking sign as tall as a horse.

  Boom.

  Holly remained single after that until Will was old enough to go away to college, and so his adolescence was spent with the two women.

  Indeed, the only other time the women were separated was the first few months of Holly’s marriage to Mr. Grey. At that time, Fiona was in a brief relationship of her own, with a retired physician, who kept exactly the distance she preferred. And when he stepped over the line, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  as Fiona put it to Holly within Will Butterfield’s hearing, that was the end of that. “Stepping over the line” for the unimaginative gentleman involved reaching over to put his hand on her breast while she showed him pictures of Holly and herself, schoolgirls at Sweet Briar. He had all the subtlety of a baboon, Holly said. Fiona is through with men, and, for that matter, so is Holly.

  The two old women agree on this. But it seems that all other matters between them are in question. They grow more quarrelsome by the hour.

  In Will and Elizabeth Butterfield’s house, the level of comfort has dwindled through the weeks and days, in more or less direct proportion to the increasing requirements of the Crazies. Neither Holly nor Fiona is particularly adept at keeping a house or its grounds—indeed, with the notable exception of the cottage in Scotland, which stood in the middle of a tangled field of wild grasses and gorse, neither of them has lived anywhere but in apartments—and so, the little house on Temporary Road is looking run-down these days. Neither of the women can cook, and they’re both rather forgetful. One day last summer, they took the car into town to have lunch. (It is usually their custom to take the bus on such occasions, so they can have a glass of wine if they wish to.) This time they took the Subaru, and they spent a fairly peaceful hour at the little café on Bower Street, across from Saint Augustine’s, eating pasta and drinking tea. When they were finished, they took the bus home. They each had a pleasant little afternoon nap, then decided that it had been such a fine day that they would take a drive into the mountains to watch the sunset. They would have dinner in a small mountain restaurant they knew. Of course, there was no car in front of the house.

  For a few minutes, they were mystified, and then they were alarmed.

  Fiona had punched in the number of the police—the line on the other end was ringing—before, as Holly put it, they realized what they had done. This realization arrived to them both almost in the same instant, according to Holly. Fiona believes she realized it first (they have argued, also, about that).

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  2.

  For Holly’s son and daughter-in-law, the summer has been overbusy and too short. And now Labor Day is upon them. The new school year has already started. The nearness of the Crazies has opened a vein of instability and unrest in Will Butterfield, and in his wife, too. A shadow has come over everything. The sense not of an impending catastrophe, but of a catastrophe already accomplished.

  The strangeness in this is that the catastrophe has already been accomplished.

  Fourteen years ago, his first wife, also named Elizabeth, disappeared.

  That is, she decided to assume another identity and live someplace else.

  What happened was this:

  He had driven with her and the two children to New Haven to visit her parents, where they spent four apparently happy days, playing yard games in the summer sun, making good things to eat and drink, and telling stories late into the night. Gail was fourteen and Mark was eleven—two delightful, dark, early adolescents with brilliant, straight-toothed smiles and deep brown eyes. On the way home, they stopped at a fast-food restaurant on the interstate just south of New York. They ate cheeseburgers and French fries and they talked about what a good time it had been, and then Elizabeth quietly excused herself from the table, saying she had to use the bathroom. She had been laughing at something the boy, Mark, said, and touched the top of his head as she left the table. Butterfield would always remember watching her disappear into the crowded rows of doorways along the far wall, near where the restrooms were.

  She never returned from the restroom, and when, after almost half an hour of waiting, he asked a waitress to go in and check on her, the waitress came out with a sad expression and said very gently that there was no one in there but there was a message. Will Butterfield walked in and saw the reflection of his own distressed, disbelieving face in the mirror through letters looping with a florid expressiveness in her bright-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  red
lipstick: i can’t do it anymore go on without me love eliza-beth. He went out and walked around the establishment, thinking it must surely be some kind of bad joke, half expecting to find her buying something in the convenience store or the service station. No one had seen her. No one had witnessed her departure, and they all looked at him, and at Mark and Gail, with a mixture of compassion and avoidance, a man with his children in tow, holding out a photograph—it was actually an expired driver’s license photo that he had liked and kept—of the missing wife and mother. At another stop, farther south, a little soft-faced balding man at the cash register of a convenience store said that he saw her get into a beat-up Olds Cutlass with a man, and drive off after buying some coffee to go. He was sure it was the same woman in the photograph. She had come into the place as a passenger in a big semi.

  He’d noticed it because he always thought it was illegal for truckers to carry riders.

  No one else knew anything, or had seen anything.

  Butterfield and the children have never heard from her—or about her—since, and, as far as they know, her poor parents haven’t, either. At least they hadn’t as late as the summer of nineteen ninety-five, the last time Butterfield spoke to them. So much has changed, and, of course, the only reason for continuing to visit them, really, has been the children. But the first Elizabeth was an adopted child, and Gail and Mark were old enough to grouse about the long drive from Virginia to Con-necticut even before their mother left. As the months of her absence wore on, Butterfield found it easy enough to let things lapse. The visits grew fewer and farther between. His first wife’s sad adoptive parents seemed resigned to their grandchildren’s new lives, and to the fact that Will never visited them anymore, though they retained an uncritical affection for him. The last time he talked with them, he expressed the hope that they might all get together soon.

  “That would be nice, Will,” his former mother-in-law said. “Well, you take care, now, and good-bye.”

  One afternoon several months later, he looked up from drowsing over a book and realized that he hadn’t called them or received a call from them in all that time and that this good-bye had ended his last con-34

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  versation with them. Feeling guilty, he tried to telephone and got no answer. He tried twice, then let it go. Things had settled this way, he decided. Gail and Mark were busy with their increasingly separate lives; they had their own concerns.

  They are both coming to spend the holiday. They seldom miss one. Gail is twenty-eight now, and Mark is twenty-six. She lives in Philadelphia, where she went to school, and her brother has lived in Indianapolis for the past several years, having moved there for a job in public relations after college in Maryland. No one intends it, but the visits always cause tension. He has grown to feel a measure of irritability about family gatherings. When Gail and Mark are present, something seems to prey on their stepmother’s sense of belonging. It’s been ten years, and even so, when Mark and Gail visit, he often feels as if he must compensate for things that get said or don’t get said in the passages of idle conversation, and in all those serviceable and apparently hospitable moments that seem—on the surface, at least—to contain anything but the seeds of discord and injured feelings.

  He cut the roses for Elizabeth from an undomesticated bush that grew back in the woods, on state land. It’s a watershed, and people with the county assured him when he bought the house that no one would ever build on it for that reason. The roses are lovely, full and round and fragrant, as if grown in a hothouse, and he has no idea how they got there, in this wild parcel of woods. It’s a mystery, and he likes that about it. He discovered them during a walk, feeling this new turmoil, and, when he saw them, he knew exactly what he would do. This afternoon, he got a pair of scissors from the shed and walked back there to put together a bouquet—a dozen pink blooms, in a bunch, wrapped in paper from the school where she teaches.

  The business with the handyman—caused, of course, by the Crazies—

  made the gesture seem diluted, or, worse, irrelevant. It went by in the need to be gracious and to make up for the difficulty the two women had obviously caused poor Oliver Ward by involving him in their squabbling.

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  And it cost Butterfield sixty dollars.

  “Roses,” he sings to Elizabeth now. “And roses and roses.” He can’t remember the rest of the song. He kisses her shoulder, standing behind her in the kitchen, where she’s cutting the flowers and putting them in a clear vase.

  “Do you want more credit than you deserve?” she says, turning to embrace him.

  “Can’t you call in sick tomorrow?” he asks.

  She gives him a look expressing the futility of the suggestion. This is the first week of school.

  Finished with the roses, she carries the vase into the living room, setting it first on the mantel, and then hesitating, one finger touching the corner of her pretty mouth.

  He says, “They look great.”

  “No.” She moves the vase to the end table opposite the front window. Then stands there, looking out. The house next door is for sale.

  The old man who lived there—someone with whom they never had a single conversation—moved into a nursing home five months ago, and while there have been several prospective buyers, it’s been empty all that time. Looking out the window now, Elizabeth straightens and murmurs,

  “Somebody’s looking at the house next door.”

  He stands at the window with her, and feels peculiarly disconcerted.

  There’s something unpleasant about the contemplation of a change, not for desiring things to remain the same but for opposing reasons: he yearns for exactly that. Some change. It’s confusing, and when he thinks about it at all, his anxiety becomes unreasonable. He steps away from the window and pretends to be concerned with the roses. She sits on the sofa and starts on her work from school. He enters the kitchen and opens the refrigerator, staring into it, aimlessly looking for something that might appeal to him. Nothing catches his eye. He returns to the entrance of the living room and watches her work for a time.

  She looks up. “What?”

  “Nothing. You look pretty sitting there in the light.”

  The telephone rings, and they pause.

  She says. “Let the answering machine get it.”

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  “They might kill each other.” He picks up the receiver and hears a computer-generated voice, that voice of impersonal technology, say an important message is about to be played. He says, aloud, “Hello, Aunt Fiona.” The voice goes on about a new, lower-interest bank card and announces that he, lucky lucky man, according to their records, is among the few who already qualify for it. He holds the phone as if he’s listening to one of his great-aunt’s rants, shaking his head. Elizabeth gives him a look of consternation tinged with exasperation. She mouths, “I told you so.”

  He says, “Fiona, please don’t call here anymore. We’ve decided that we wish to break off relations with you and Mother entirely.” He hangs the phone up.

  His wife seems astonished for a second or two, but then frowns skeptically and shakes her head. “Who was it, really?”

  “The Visa card of our dreams.”

  “I had a second’s hope.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  She says nothing.

  “Okay, you mean it.”

  “Oh, Will. They are driving me crazy.”

  “I think they may be getting that idea.”

  A moment later, she says, “It’s Labor Day already and I don’t feel like we had a summer. Gail and Mark are coming and I haven’t done anything to prepare for them.”

  “Come on. They’ve been with you almost as long as they were with their mother. They don’t need special treatment.”

  “They’ve always needed special treatment from me, Will. And you know it.”

  “I think you’ve built that up in your
mind a little.”

  “That’s not what I get from Gail,” Elizabeth says. “Really.”

  Her own parents have been gone since she was twenty-three. Within a year of each other. “The king died,” she told Will when they were first dating, “and then the queen died, of grief.” This wasn’t strictly true.

  Elizabeth’s mother lost her life in a bus crash, twenty miles south of At-lanta, on Route 85. She was on a tour of Civil War battlefields. Eliza-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  beth believes she would never have been on such a trip, would never have registered for such a trip, if her husband had been alive. Will would say that, for Elizabeth, the world is often a threatening place.

  His second wife sometimes has trouble holding on to any sort of cheerfulness. It requires effort, the expense of spirit. She’s up to it, without quite feeling that this is so, and she’s unaware of the resonance that this underlying darkness gives to her personality; it’s a major aspect of her charm. It’s as if the very timbre of her voice were slightly colored by it.

  People are captivated by her without quite realizing that it would not surprise them to learn that she’d been through something desperate or extreme.

  All her depths are darker-shaded than her seeming brightness, and this has been true as long as he has known her.

  She spent most of her childhood in a house whose central ethos was that of a kind of fortress or barricade against the outside, because her parents, though happy enough together, were rather bizarrely distrust-ful of everyone and everything else. Many summer evenings, Elizabeth sat out on the little porch purely for the air, purely in reaction to the suffocating atmosphere of the fastness behind her. Her parents loved her and each other, but their lives were mean and narrowly confined to suspicion, doubt, and misgiving about the simplest social dealings, and she felt this like a weight. Sitting on the stoop, looking at her street, she took to repeating the word away—away, away, like a prayer, wanting so badly to be able to go wherever away might be, as long as it wasn’t the bastion of the house behind her.