Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  So, of course, she left home at the first opportunity, eloping with an air force boy, who never got past being a boy and who thought she had been born to care for him in the way his mother had always cared for him—picking up after him, and tending to his every whim, and listening to his troubles, even, on occasion, rocking him to sleep at night.

  His name was Jimmy. That is, there was no proper name, no James. It was Jimmy on the birth certificate. Jimmy liked to call her Mommy, the way his father called his own mother. So, she answered to the name Mommy, for a time. Sex with him was hurried and loutish from the start, but after they were living together, he settled into a pattern of re-38

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  hearsed actions and lines, all having to do with his sense of what domestic happiness must be—mirroring what he saw in his parents. He grew more and more steadily demanding, especially in the bedroom. Sex with him, which had been her first, began to feel creepily familial as if she were breaking some ancient taboo merely allowing him to kiss her while murmuring “Mommy,” over and over. Which, after the first weeks, was the only way he could become excited enough to make love. “Mommy,”

  he would murmur. “Oh, Mommy, kiss me there.”

  She left him after six disastrous months and moved south, where she went to college, graduating in record time (only two and a half years, because she went in the summers, too—it was as though she were in flight, to get as far away from the marriage in mind and body as possible), and she became a high school teacher. She never spent more than a day or two in her parents’ home after that first escape, at the age of seventeen. And they have been gone for a long time now.

  When she met Will, she had, for several years, been seeing a man she was introduced to in college. It wasn’t serious on her part, though everyone around her wondered why. He was handsome—pretty, actually—and accomplished, interesting, and wealthy, and about Elizabeth he was almost fanatical. But the bad marriage had made her wary, and perhaps this was part of the problem. Then, too, there was something about his very ardor that worked against him. His name was Andrew and he was always finding new ways to ask her to marry him. He started with the cliché of the diamond ring in a glass of champagne (she wept and told him she required time after the failed marriage to Jimmy), and, in following months, moved to other methods: a series of flower deliveries, singing telegrams, and finally stunts. He rented a billboard (eliza-beth, please say yes), and then had a small plane fly over with a trail of smoke that said marry me (the smoke got in the wind that came up, so very quickly the words thinned out to say mar me with tails of ragged smudges suspended from the letters). Andrew looked at her with a devoted, puppy-dog expression that made her feel weirdly uneasy, as if something in her makeup called up this kind of behavior in men. It reminded her too painfully of everything she had run away from.

  When Will entered her life, he seemed refreshingly self-contained, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  and there was something sweetly relaxed about him—a man without urgency. She’d never seen anything like it—even her father, compared to Will, seemed afflicted with that peculiar hyperactivity of men, burdened somehow for competition, poised for some mental or psychological leap. Will simply went along in the hours of his day, amused, glad to be wherever he was, interested in things without wanting necessarily to possess them. She had accepted the first date with him out of a wish to separate finally from Andrew, and had discovered that she wanted more, wanted to see Will again. She spent the hours when she wasn’t with him feeling an agreeable nostalgia for his presence. There was an evenness about him, a sense that he was only provisionally present, only looking around. It charmed her, because it appeared not quite to include her.

  3.

  “Do you really want me not to answer the phone?” he asks her now.

  “I have a lot of work to do. I swear it’s more every year. Stupid rote work, filling out names. It’s ridiculous. Go ahead and answer it if you want. But leave me out of it.” She leans over to the coffee table and brings back the stack of her work, sighing, shaking her head slightly.

  One of her tasks now is to decide which students get to be in an honors English group, and there are brief essays from the candidates. She reads the first one, puts it aside with a sharpness—the gesture she uses when the work is dead. With the second one, she seems faintly interested. “Oh,” she says. “Listen to this: ‘Shakespeare must have had a bad childhood because Macbeth shows how much I bet he hated his mother, and all women.’”

  “Boy or girl?” he asks. Sometimes she reads him this sort of thing, and they laugh.

  She looks back at the paper. “Boy. Seeking points with his feminist honors teacher.”

  “Are you a feminist?”

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  “Apparently.”

  “Let’s go out and have a nice dinner somewhere.”

  “I’ve got all this to do, Will. I’m not hungry.”

  He’s quiet. He had thought the roses would lighten her mood. She sits there working.

  “I guess I’m not much fun,” she says now, without looking up.

  “It’s okay.” He takes up part of the newspaper on the table, and snaps it to straighten the page. He sees that she has turned to him with a start.

  “Are you mad?” she says.

  “No,” he says. “Why?”

  She returns to her work. He reads for a time, then gets up and goes into the bedroom. In the closet is a coffee tin with dope in it. He rolls himself a joint and brings it with him back to the living room.

  “Want some?” he says, lighting it.

  She only glances at him. But smiles and nods. “I thought of it an hour ago.”

  n i g h t h o u r s

  1.

  The sun is going from the sky and the day is cooling and fall is coming.

  Oliver Ward drives along uncertainly in his truck, full of tequila and merriment. He’s thinking about the coming season. It’s almost joy that he feels now—what he has always considered to be joy: that combination of happiness mingled with the knowledge of its frailty with which he has always experienced gladness, any happy pass.

  This particular gladness is laced with Mexican firewater, and he’s aware of the ephemeral nature of it. For the moment, though, this is fine with him. He thinks a little sadly about the fact that he’ll have to stop sitting on the porch, playing guitar in the evenings. Another winter, another slacking off of opportunities for his kind of work. But it’ll be all right. He feels certain things will, as they always have, take care of themselves.

  When the car with its flashing red and blue lights pulls quickly in behind him, he has a moment of alarm, but he pulls over and waits, smiling. It’ll still be all right. Things are sweet. He knows most of the police, because of his daughter. The policeman is a young man, chiseled, clean as this morning’s fresh shirt. He has a hat with a flat bill and a 42

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  chin strap. His bearing is military. “License and registration, please,” he says crisply, not making eye contact.

  Oliver says, “One second.” Then: “Is everything all right?”

  “You were weaving. Sir, I’m gonna have to ask you to get out of the car.”

  Oliver does so, and stands there for the young man’s inspection. “I did have one margarita with my dinner.”

  The young man looks like a high school kid, and Oliver doesn’t recognize him. “Hello,” he says.

  “One minute, sir.”

  Presently, the officer says, “Can you take a few steps for me, sir?”

  Then, gazing at him with puzzlement, “Are you telling me you can’t?”

  Oliver explains patiently, as he has always done, about the tic in his neck. Then obligingly walks a few paces away. He concentrates and manages it, feels himself managing it and is proud, is even sure of himself now. He turns and waits. The officer seems to be waiting, too. The lights from the squad car circle in the long shadows of t
he street.

  “Walk back, please,” the young man says.

  Oliver accommodates him. And he almost laughs when his stride fal -

  ters a second. But he rights himself and comes on.

  “I don’t think you should drive, sir.”

  “I understand,” he says quickly. Though now he’s worrying about how his daughter will take this. “Is it a problem if I call my daughter and tell her I won’t make it home? She works for the force, you know.

  Alison Ward Lawrence?”

  “Alison?”

  “That’s her.”

  The young man shifts slightly. “Look. How far is home?”

  “It’s just down the street actually. A left turn about a mile up.”

  “Go straight there?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ll follow you to the turn,” says the officer.

  “Thank you.”

  They get back into their respective vehicles, and Oliver pulls out.

  He’s extra careful, looking back down the empty prospect of the street, with the distant lights wavering in it. Perhaps he himself might’ve said t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  no to this. Of course, with the tic in his neck that is his constant expression anyway: always no. The thought makes him smile again. Well, it’s a pretty world, anyway, he thinks. Great Mother of Big Apples, yes. He can’t remember where he heard that or read it, and then he can: Kenneth Patchen. Of course. Oliver used to carry the poet’s book around with him when he was in the war. Kenneth Patchen. A little City Lights paperback, Poems of Humor & Protest. Oliver’s favorite poet, Kenneth Patchen, mostly for the love poems, and he does know some things, he’s not illiterate, and the one Shakespeare play he has seen pleased him very much. He’s read plenty of books, back in the day, as they all say now. Men his age, so many, who have prospered where he has not but whose lives nevertheless seem strangely unsatisfactory to them. It isn’t the tequila that makes Oliver smile now, though it helps. It does help.

  In a funny way, it reminds him of his own good fortune, while he rides along, naggingly also aware of the repeating negative gesture.

  The police car follows closely. And now the lights come on again.

  Oliver realizes that he has drifted toward the curb. He parks the truck and gets out.

  The ride to the police station is pleasant. They talk a little about Oliver’s evening. He mentions the crazy ladies he visited, and the sixty dollars, thirty-six of which he still has in his pocket. He tells the young man that it was happy hour and he did have two or three margaritas—

  ice-cold and tasting so wonderful. Has the officer ever had a margarita?

  Yes. The two men agree, it’s a marvelous drink, but not while one is driving. “No,” Oliver tells him. “I know that. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just going to buy a bottle and take it home.”

  “People don’t think,” says the officer.

  “I’m Oliver,” he says. “My daughter’s probably told you about me.”

  “No, sir. I’ve never actually spoken to her. But I know who she is.”

  “I’m so sorry to have caused any trouble.”

  “Is there someone you can have come and get you?”

  “Well, my daughter works so hard.”

  “You’ll have to come to the courthouse tomorrow to be arraigned, and there’ll be a bond. Can she pay it?”

  Oliver hears these words and comes crashing down out of the clouds of good feeling through which he has been sailing. He sits back and 44

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  looks out the window at the passing desolation of the street—this part of Point Royal is particularly rundown and dilapidated—and with all his heart he wishes he were someone other than who he is. “Like I said, she works so hard,” he says, “I don’t want to bother her on her days off.

  I’ll stay the night. If—I mean, we can’t really afford the bond.”

  They ride along in silence. Oliver folds his hands in his lap and bows his head, then looks again out at the boarded-up shops, the mostly empty lots, and the occasional restaurant facades, with their blinking neon and cartoon shapes, and blazing words eat. abc on & off. dancing. cocktails. All the appeals to night appetites. This fellow in the front seat has decided about him, no doubt. And, no doubt, he’s near enough to being right.

  At the station, they book him, and then an older man with a big belly and tufts of black hair in his ears walks him down to a cell. The drunk tank, though he doesn’t call it that. There are two others in the room, already sleeping the sleep of the guilty—one of them, not much beyond being a teenager, smells of vomit and cleanser, a badness that makes the air almost too heavy to breathe. It stings the lungs. Oliver sits in the farthest corner, away from the others, whose agitated sleep seems on the point of breaking, yet doesn’t. They sleep on. Oliver’s awake. The tequila’s wearing off. He won’t sleep. He’ll sit here and think about the course of his evening, the counterfeit cheer of the end of it, the comedown. Poor Alison. He has failed her yet again, and this is not the time, with her best friend and next-door neighbor getting set to leave for an extended time away. Alison has been worried about it for weeks, and, in the harsh, sobering minutes of the next hour, he comes to the fact, evident though unspoken, that she is mostly afraid of having no one now to turn to, no one on whom she can depend. His divorced girl, with her two children and her worries about money, and her deadbeat husband.

  Deadbeat husband.

  He murmurs the phrase aloud. Then murmurs another: “Deadbeat father, too.” When Oliver is down, as he is presently down, he mutters out loud, becoming the voice of his own dispassionate judgment of himself: a complete malfunction in everything, a loss, one of the many troubles life has visited upon his lovely daughter. “Alison,” he says, low, as if t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  she’s sitting right there with him. “I was so happy, I just didn’t think.”

  But no. He won’t allow himself this conceit. A child’s excuse for bad behavior. If only he were different; if only he weren’t always vaguely lonely and filled with a sense of something missing, something left un-done, something frail and aching at his center, waiting for light, relief, balm.

  He wipes his eyes, sitting against the plastic sculpted seat-back, looking at the sleeping shapes in the enclosure that isn’t like a jail cell so much as a hospital waiting room without a television. There’s a couple of other cots in the room, but he stays where he is. It’s going to be a long, bad, cold, cold wait for morning.

  2.

  Brother Fire, this evening, sits in the den of the rectory, trying to read his newspaper. Father McFadden lounges on the sofa across from him, with a notebook open in his lap, pondering over something he has written. The old priest has recently learned that Father McFadden desires to become proficient at the reading and writing of poetry. He thinks of it in this way, as a form of learned dexterity. He has discovered that he can figure out the scansion of different poems and then try to reproduce the rhythms and rhymes of those poems. The trouble is, he has no ear at all and no gift for metaphor. The poems are excruciating, and at times unwittingly hilarious. Tonight, he reads two of them to Brother Fire. The first is called “Romancing the Cross.” The old priest can’t help tuning it out after the first two lines—“There were no smiles on Calvary that day/

  No one could even begin thinking what they ought to say.”

  “What do you think?” Father McFadden asks, staring. “Something’s not right. The rhythm, maybe. Something.”

  “Wasn’t there a movie by the name of Romancing the Something?”

  Father McFadden pauses, frowns, then lifts his chin slightly. “Oh,”

  he says. “No. That would be Romancing the Stone.”

  “I see.”

  “Did you hear the sprung rhythms in this, though—after Hopkins?”

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  There are lies of kindness. “Yes,”
says Brother Fire. He’s suffering a little heartburn, which is lately rather frequent. He desires nothing more than to listen to the music that’s playing—Mozart’s clarinet quin-tet. But Father McFadden wants, in his enthusiasm, to talk. And to read his poems. Brother Fire thinks of it as a small penance. And then, very soon, it becomes a great penance. The other man reads his second poem; this one, he says, to John Donne. Brother Fire loses track of it, too, after the second line: “The battering of God outshined the sun/And battered your heart as you said he did, Donne.” This is followed by six other rhymes of the name Donne. Gun. Run. Bun. Spun. Pun. Stun. And a slant rhyme using the word wonton.

  It’s almost more than can be borne, even for a penance. It goes on for some time, because Father McFadden likes to sound the dramatic notes he hears in the lines. Brother Fire tries to keep his face from showing his increasing discomfort.

  Earlier, they had a meal of lamb chops and fresh kale with garlic and olive oil, and it’s the garlic that’s bothering the Monsignor.

  “I’ve always liked good rhyming,” Father McFadden says. “Do you think this sounds a little singsongy? Maybe I should put some other rhymes in.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “I think it sounded a little singsongy. Especially when I say ‘The bright sinews of your heart could be tied up in a bun/And brushed like a girl’s long locks so long and spun.’ What do you think?”

  “I don’t know anything about poetry.” Brother Fire inwardly asks pardon for the lie. He has the slightest urge to teach the other man, and then thinks better of it. Such a tack would upset Father McFadden’s equilibrium. The old priest understands, without having to voice it to himself, that his curate rides happily on a very thin web of warm feeling: the slightest negative note can derail him. Black Irish. Father McFadden’s greatest battle with himself involves his temper, which plagues him. At the religion classes one evening, Brother Fire was walking by the curate’s class—a group of high school students, who were apparently talking and not paying attention. “I am not,” Father McFadden said—