Thanksgiving Night
Page 11
91
chin widening, the new width of her cheeks giving her a look of faint distrust. There’s something glowering about it. Mark, on the other hand, is thinner than he ever was, too thin. With the lean musculature of his arms, the once-weight-lifter’s definition of bicep and forearm—those thick veins forking down the bone—and with the sad little goatee actually graying at his long chin, he looks a little as though he might’ve walked out of an El Greco. He seems depleted, more from Gail’s company than from the heat. They’ve been squabbling. Will helps with the suitcases—Gail has packed as if for weeks—and Mark goes directly to the kitchen to put away the foods he’s brought. He’s on a special new diet: fish and eggs, mostly. Low carb, but with this twist, his own, about eating only fish. Fish oil is supposed to lower cholesterol. He has packed sea bass, trout, and salmon. He’ll cook for everyone, he tells them. Gail is strictly vegan, so there are also her requirements to worry about.
Mark tries a joke, asking Gail if vegans give up their sense of humor with meat.
“Oh, Christ,” Gail says. And the weekend can be said to have begun.
In the kitchen, Elizabeth prepares iced tea, and Butterfield joins her.
“There’re some interesting pamphlets in the front seat of the Honda,”
he says.
She gives him a puzzled look.
“Gay rights. Lesbian activism.”
“Why don’t you ask her about it?”
“I don’t think I want to know,” he says.
The Crazies pull in with Brother Fire, and there’s a lot of commotion. Greetings and offers of food and drink, chatter about the road, the weather, Mark’s flight from Indiana. The Crazies are going to have the house on Temporary Road partitioned—made into a duplex. It’s decided. They’ve hired the contractor: Mr. Oliver Ward. A very kindly gentleman. Holly introduces the priest, though everyone already knows him. “You remember Brother Fire,” she says. Elizabeth shakes his prof-fered hand and looks into his warm, blue gaze.
Mark and Gail complain about the heat and about the fact that they had to drive without air-conditioning, because the radiator in the Honda kept overheating.
92
Richard Bausch
“Why don’t you fix it?” Fiona asks them. “You’re like a dog sitting on a nail and howling because he’s too lazy to get up off of the nail.”
There’s a silence.
“Count on Fiona,” says Holly and stops there, as if nothing else needs saying.
The afternoon is tense, ruined by a brittle politeness. And then, at dinner—spinach salad, broiled salmon, and corn—Gail announces that she’s been searching for her mother. For a moment, no one says anything. The exasperation shows in Mark’s face: he’s known about this for some time. Perhaps they argued about it in the car, driving down from Philadelphia.
“You think she wants you to find her?” Butterfield says.
“I guess I’ll know that soon enough.”
“Any leads?” He pours more of the chardonnay Holly and Fiona brought, which Fiona is not drinking.
“Grandma and Grandpa,” Gail says.
“They’ve heard from her?”
“They haven’t heard from anybody.”
This is aimed at the whole family. “Well, they’ve heard from you,”
Butterfield says. “Haven’t they?”
Gail ignores this. “Grandpa gave me the name of a girlfriend she had in school. I tracked her down in Florida, and she told me she got a postcard from Mom only a few years ago.”
“How many years?”
“Three.”
“That’s an age, kid.”
“Maybe. I’ve got a woman working on it for me. From an agency that helps people find loved ones. She says three years is closing in on locating somebody.”
Butterfield looks across the table at his wife who can’t decide what the look means. He turns to Mark. “You in on this?”
“I found out about it on the way down here,” Mark says. “I found out in spades, if you know what I mean.”
And then everyone seems at a loss.
Gail goes on, talking of a book she read about missing persons. Ac-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
93
cording to the authors of this book—a pair of psychological counselors from San Francisco—there are more than three million people in the country who are “disappeared.”
“A verb turned into a noun,” says Brother Fire. “It’s usually the other way around these days. People talk about ‘gifting,’ for instance, and
‘parenting.’”
“Could make a person think of ‘suiciding,’” says Butterfield.
The priest grins and nods. “Well, if he couldn’t find someone to ‘solace’ him.”
Gail interrupts crisply to say that the book offers solace for those in her situation. Fiona declares that if she herself wanted to disappear—and she has indeed wanted to, from time to time—she would make it so no one could ever find her.
“That might be just the thing,” Holly says. “One lives on hope, doesn’t one?”
“What do you think will happen if you find her, Gail?” Butterfield asks abruptly.
Gail hesitates only a second. “I don’t have the slightest idea. I plan to find out.”
“Maybe she’s dead,” says Fiona.
“Then I’ll find that out.”
Elizabeth notices that Holly’s gazing at her from the end of the table.
She knows what’s coming. Holly doesn’t disappoint her: “How does this make you feel?”
“I’m neutral,” Elizabeth tells her and feels a displeasing sense of having lied. Holly seems to think so; she gives a little shrug, smiling out of one side of her mouth.
“I damn sure wouldn’t be,” Holly says.
“Well,” says Will, “I’m not neutral for sure.” He fixes Gail with a stare. “You find her, missy, I don’t want to know about it. Okay? I don’t care about it, you know?”
“You mean you wouldn’t even be curious?”
“Not remotely.”
“Me, too,” Mark says. “I don’t want to know.”
“That’s so like men,” Gail says. “All tied up in their injured egos.”
94
Richard Bausch
“That’s me,” says Mark. “Help yourself to the sweeping generality.”
“God is in the particulars,” says Fiona brightly. “Isn’t that right, Father?”
“Yes,” says the priest. “Exactly.”
“Well, I think I’d be curious,” says Holly. And takes a slow sip of the wine. Her enjoyment of it seems subtly enhanced by the fact that Fiona has refused any. She glances at her aunt with each sip, almost as if to taunt her.
“Yes,” says Brother Fire. “The thought comes from Aquinas. ‘It would seem that God is simple.’ I remember reading that when I was eighteen and being appalled. How could the creator of so much complex reality be simple? It seemed insulting to the majesty of God. But the particulars—the simplicity of that. And the devil, evil, is of course understood as the spirit of sophistry and rationalization.”
“What’s the name of the book?” Mark asks.
“The Summa Theologica. Saint Thomas Aquinas. He spent twenty years writing it, and after it was done, he had some sort of revelation and renounced all of it. Called it straw. And spent the rest of his life living quietly on faith. Wouldn’t even talk about his great book.”
“There’s an online group called Finding Mom,” Gail says, “that adopted people use. I’ve joined them, too, and I’m going to find her.”
“I don’t think your father wants to talk about this,” Elizabeth says.
“I don’t either,” says Mark. “It got talked about anyway. All the way from Philadelphia to here. Incessantly. In spades.”
“Poor baby,” Gail says. “What’s that mean anyway. In spades?”
“It means incessantly. Until I can’t stand it. I’m sorry, I should’ve explained it to you.”
“We have a real missing person in our family,” Fiona says to Brother Fire.
The priest seems faintly at sea. He nods, frowning with interest, but you can see that he hopes this is enough. There’s a very slight tremor in his hands as he folds them. Elizabeth looks at his light blue eyes, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
95
the network of wrinkles around them. It’s a weathered, humorous, like-able face—with tufted dark brows and an imposing forehead, a sculpted, long nose, under which part of the thin mouth disappears when he smiles. The face seems rather sad just now. She leans toward him a little and says, “Tell us more about Aquinas, Father.”
“We were on the subject of our missing person,” says Gail.
“No, we were not on that subject,” Elizabeth says. “We had left it to talk about Aquinas.”
“Well, I just want everyone to know—”
“You’ve made your noise,” says Will. “Now let it alone. Christ.” He turns quickly to the priest. “I’m sorry.”
“I always follow the profane use of the name with a prayer,” the priest says.
“You’d spend all your time praying in this family,” Fiona puts in, not quite under her breath.
“I’m going back to Philadelphia,” says Gail. And then, without looking at anyone, she rises from the table, collects her plate, wine glass, salad bowl, and napkin, and starts toward the kitchen.
“Don’t let the door hit you in the ass,” says Butterfield, before turning to the priest and saying again, “Sorry. That’s something we all used to say in my family. It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“You ought to be ashamed,” Fiona says.
“It’s been apologized for, Aunt Fiona. And now’s the time for you to practice some Christian forbearance. Right, Father?”
The priest nods and looks to one side, toward Fiona, so that it’s as if he has acceded to and denied the thought at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” Will says again.
2.
Elizabeth talks Gail out of leaving by reiterating softly the litany of Will’s reasons for not wanting to talk about his ex-wife. Gail listens.
It’s one of the good qualities she possesses: Even when adamant about 96
Richard Bausch
something, she will patiently listen to opposing views—there’s a kind of intellectual pride in it for her. But nothing deters her once her mind is made up. And, in this instance, she’s committed to the search. “It’s my mother, after all,” she says. “And I want to talk to her.”
“Do you want to ask her why she did what she did?”
Gail considers for a moment. “No. I really just want to have a normal conversation, woman to woman.” And her eyes suddenly brim over with tears. “What’s wrong with that?”
“There’s nothing at all wrong with it,” Elizabeth tells her, putting a hand on her shoulder.
The evening ends with Fiona and Holly arguing about plans to partition their house on Temporary Road. They try to involve the poor priest, who speaks generally and kindly about the push and pull of family love.
When they’ve left, and Gail and Mark have gone upstairs to their respective rooms, Elizabeth puts her arms around Will’s neck and kisses his cheek. “Don’t be so hard on Gail,” she says.
“I wish we were alone,” he tells her. Through the wall, they hear Gail’s music—Indigo Girls.
“We can be quiet.”
“You all right?” he asks.
“Sure,” she says. “Even the Crazies weren’t so bad.”
“You think so, do you?”
“I felt sorry for poor Brother Fire, being between them.”
“Everybody’s always between them,” says Will. “Everywhere they go.”
Through the rest of the weekend, Gail keeps bringing up aspects of her search for the first Elizabeth. It’s as if she can’t help it, thinking aloud. It’s on her mind. It worries her. Will grows quiet or finds some neutral reason to leave the room. But, several times, she and Mark exchange bitter words about it. The whole holiday is weighted with this tension. The Crazies come over for dinner each night, and Holly comments on the bad electricity between Mark and his sister. “They always argued,” Will says. “It’s probably a primal need for the young.
You’re an only child, and you had an only child, and so you didn’t see a lot of it.”
t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
97
Sunday night, Gail begins talking about gay rights, and Will breaks in to ask her point-blank: “Missy, are you telling us something?”
“I’m telling you what I’m telling you.”
“Which is—”
“Oh, Jesus, Dad. Have I frightened you?”
“I’m just trying to figure out the boundaries here, kiddo.”
“Don’t call me kiddo.”
“Kiddo,” Will says, staring into her. “Okay, there, kiddo? Kiddo.
Kiddo.”
Elizabeth steps in. “Can we please stop harrowing each other?”
She’s worn out with it, has felt several times like throwing something.
Sunday morning, she almost poured water on their heads, going past them to water houseplants while the arguing went on about how important or absurd it was or wasn’t, concerning what the first Elizabeth might’ve seen or done or been through, and if she’d had other husbands, other children. All that, back and forth. And Gail’s brand of feminism has been threaded through it all—the depredations of male-dominated society having, Gail bothers to point out, produced the pressures that must’ve made the first Elizabeth abandon everything and run.
Now Will says, “Kiddo is a term of endearment, I believe. Even when you’re twenty-eight years old and absolutely cocksure of your own opinions about everything.”
“Cocksure?”
“Yes, cocksure. Cocksure. Cocksure. Look it up.”
“I find ‘kiddo’ and ‘cocksure’ offensive.”
“You find those things offensive. Are you looking? What’ve you—got radar or something? Turning slow on the world, looking for offenses?”
“Can we all please stop?” Elizabeth says. “Please? Can we? Please?
Please?”
When brother and sister leave, Monday afternoon, they’re barely civil with each other. “That’ll be a long, hard ride back,” Will says.
“It was a long, hard weekend,” says Elizabeth. “It was like dealing with my high school kids. And now I have to do just that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “Baby. I really am.”
w i l l a n d t h e e l i z a b e t h s
1.
Several nights in the first year after the first Elizabeth left, he found both children up, talking. Sometimes he had drunk a little too much scotch, intentionally, so he would sleep—sleep having become a thing he had to chase through the nights, and there were times when it did feel precisely as if he were pursuing it through an arid landscape of feverish half-dreams that broke down slumber and left him anxious, staring into the dark, listening to the sounds of the sleeping house. So, he would drink a good deal of scotch, for the narcotic effect, and come stumbling in his stocking feet to the top of the stairs, and he would find Gail and Mark, awake talking. They stopped when they saw him, and the heavy concentration in their faces shifted to forced smiles and arti-ficial casualness: they evidently thought that he would, as he had done often enough, remain downstairs on the couch. They waited for him to speak. And he waited for something to occur to him to say. He knew they were in pain, and he was in pain—he knew they worried about him. And, of course, he was worried about them but they couldn’t really speak of it. They seemed at times to be like other children—they bick-ered and got cross at little things, but they also laughed and were silly, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
99
too; Gail also had problems sleeping, and would be up late, reading, or simply lying in the light, looking at her ceiling. When he questioned her about it, she would say that she wasn’t sleepy. One night, he sat on the edge of the bed and took her hands.
“Are you thinking about your mother?”
“No.”
“You’re sure.”
“Daddy.” There was a certain elliptical slant to her cheekbones that made it seem always that she was about to smile, and when the smile didn’t come, there was a little surprise about it. It never failed to charm him, and at times, in those first months, he thought it might break his heart.
“Do you think about her?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do you and Mark talk about her?”
“Sometimes.”
“You can tell me, sweetie. Really.”
She looked down at her own hands on the blanket covering her knees.
“Can you tell me what you talk about?”
Now she gave him a look. “Her.”
“But what, though,” he said. “You know.”
She turned from him and fluffed her pillow. “I don’t know.”
It was clear that this was something so private for her—something about which, for whatever reasons, she could not talk to her father. So he tried to let her know that he was there for her if she ever did want to.
There wasn’t anything else he could think of to do. He went on with the daily matters—the household, the meals, school. Twice he attended a meeting of single parents, one that was actually for the parents of abandoned children. The participants in this group happened to be women, and it seemed to him that they all looked at him with eyes that wondered why. He never went back.
His chief worry was that the children blamed themselves. Mark, of course, was the tough one; well, he was working at being tough, anyway—he wanted weights for his twelfth birthday and he spent an 100
Richard Bausch
hour every day lifting them. At twelve and a half, for his height and small-boned compactness, he looked buff. It was worrisome. Butterfield had waking horrors imagining the boy bulking up like those freaks in the weightlifting magazines, with their roils of muscle, those outlandish bulges forking with veins; caricatures, disproportionate combinations of knotted shapes, walking overstatements of the human form.