Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  Butterfield steps to the bar and asks her for whatever Fiona’s drinking.

  The woman nods and pours a malt scotch. “The McCallum,” she says, putting the glass down. “It’s eight dollars a glass.” Her voice is richly sensuous and changes his mind. She does have beauty. This thought comes to him, and he examines it with a form of puzzlement. What in the world—? Why is he in this state of mind at all, looking in this evaluative way at a woman behind the bar of a place like Macbeth’s?

  “Here,” Fiona says, pushing the twenty toward her.

  “Expensive whiskey,” Butterfield says.

  “Very,” says the bartender.

  Fiona finishes hers, opens her purse, and brings out another twenty.

  The beautiful bartender puts five on the counter and starts to turn away.

  “Ariana,” Fiona says. “One more here.”

  “Fiona, let’s finish our drinks,” Butterfield says. “Let’s go home. I’ll take you home.”

  “Take a cab,” she says. Then she and the two young men go on talking. The subject is hockey. One of the men played in high school. He’s t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  from Minnesota. They’re also talking about the far north. This turns out to be Ronny, who says he loves Canada and all things Canadian. His favorite hockey team, he says, is the Montreal Maple Leafs. Fiona says,

  “You ass. It’s the Montreal Canadiens. Or Habs, for Habitant. It’s Toronto that has the Maple Leafs. How much do you love all things Canadian?”

  “I was testing you,” Ronny says.

  His friend Abe says, “He was lying.” And, as Ronny tries to explain how he likes to test people’s knowledge by pretending ignorance, Abe keeps repeating, “He’s lying. He’s lying.”

  Ronny stops and looks to be fuming a little now, his jaw muscles tightening.

  “He likes people to buy him drinks.”

  “I don’t mind,” Fiona says.

  “I like hockey and all things Canadian and anyone who doesn’t believe me ought to watch himself.”

  “Ronny’s creative,” Abe says. “Right, Ron?”

  It’s all rattling in a bar, and Butterfield sips his whiskey, feeling his own migraine coming on. “Fiona,” he says. And then has to repeat it, loudly. “Fiona.”

  “Well, I know you’re lying,” Fiona says to Ronny. “You’re drunk.

  Can’t you hold your liquor?”

  Ronny laughs good-naturedly, and then moves off. It turns out that the two young men aren’t together at all. They’re just the men to whom Fiona was talking.

  Now Abe moves off, too, after giving Fiona a kiss on the cheek.

  Butterfield has a sense—he almost feels it as his own—of the mortifica-tion awaiting poor Fiona in the morning, after having spent time arguing in this way among others under the influence. He sips the whiskey and watches as the barkeep named Ariana puts another one down on the bar. Fiona lifts the glass and peers into the amber light of it, then takes a small sip, beginning to mutter something. Butterfield leans in to hear.

  “I taught’er to drive a car. Me. Taught’er about boys an’ men and books. Like a older sister, an’ what do I get. What do I get for th’ years when she was hurting and unhappy and the boy was a baby, all th’ hard 136

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  times I went through with’er. Sisters. An’ she repays me with dis’r’spect, sarcasm. Sarcasm.”

  “Fiona, do you want to spend the night with us?”

  She ignores him, muttering, cataloging again the slights and in-gratitudes she imagines Holly has heaped on her. Years of abuse, she mutters, dark jealousies and failures to appreciate happiness, loyalty, love—all the generosity of heart that Fiona remembers providing over the decades—everything, of course, exaggerated by the overwrought and besotted state she’s in. Butterfield knows it will continue until she goes to sleep. The thing is to get her home before this happens. No one seems really to be with anyone here. It’s just Butterfield and his great-aunt at this end of the bar now. He leans his elbows on it and sips the whiskey and waits for her to pause.

  “Fiona,” he says. “Fiona?”

  At last she stops, whiskey held to her mouth, and regards him. In that instant, the big man with the bagpipes comes from a door on the other side of the room and begins the suspiring whine of the instrument, walking around the room with a swagger and the slightest tipsy hesitation when he turns. Fiona raises one hand as if to wave at him. She turns to Butterfield and seems surprised to find him there. She shouts,

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came to take you home,” he shouts back.

  “Not goin’ back there until he’s finished dividing th’place up.”

  “Come on, Aunt Fiona. This is childish.”

  “What’a you know about it? You don’t know.”

  He finishes the whiskey and watches the red-haired man blast away on the bagpipes to the glassy expressions on the faces of the clientele.

  The onslaught lasts for what seems a terribly long time. At length, the man retreats, with a great amount of leaning and twisting, making adjustments for the bulky instrument he’s carrying through the narrow door. After the door closes, the silence is almost solid-feeling to the ears.

  Aunt Fiona moves down the bar and begins a conversation with the man there—a man closer to her age. She says bluntly that he’s wearing the ugliest shirt she ever saw—it is rather startlingly loud, with what looks in this light like all the wrong colors—and the man seems entertained.

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  She asks how much it cost him. He says he doesn’t remember. She asks if he has a lot of money to throw away on ugly shirts. He says, “Yes,”

  smiling.

  The bartender, Ariana, comes down to Butterfield and leans on the bar across from him. “She’s fun,” she says about Fiona.

  “She’s drunk,” Butterfield says.

  “You want another McCallum?”

  He nods. She pours it while he watches. When she sets it in front of him, she says, “Do you come here a lot?”

  “Couple times in the last year.”

  She smiles. “Not a regular.”

  “No.”

  “I’m new here.” She offers her hand. “Ariana.”

  Her handshake is firm. When he lets go, she leans on the bar again.

  “We’re in the process of moving in,” she says.

  Butterfield nods, sipping the whiskey. She tips her head slightly, regarding him. “That your mom?”

  “Great-aunt.”

  “That’s kind of sweet. She live with you?”

  He begins telling her about the Crazies. Others come to the bar for refills, and she takes care of it all, returning each time to hear more. She leans close, chin on one hand, staring deeply at him while he talks. It’s oddly conspiratorial feeling. Butterfield talks on, not criticizing Holly and Fiona—there’s, of course, plenty to say just confining oneself to the history. He has two more whiskeys, and the evening goes on, Fiona ordering hers and having her own conversation with the man at the other end of the bar. The word Watergate comes to Butterfield, and he knows she’s going on about the present scandal. He tries to tune it out. Twice more, the bagpipe man comes in with his ruckus. Butterfield finds himself glad of it. He watches Ariana and is troubled by the strange light in her black eyes when she talks to him. She says she and her husband have lived in nine different towns and never been quite happy in any of them, that she never watches television, that she grew up in France at the American embassy, that they’ve rented a house here in Point Royal but she’s already restless. “Do you ever get restless?” she asks.

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  He nods. “Sure.” The whiskey has loosened his inhibitions. He’s enjoying this.

  “Look at me,” she says, and he is, and so he has a split second’s surprise before she continues: “I’m telling you all this. You’re supposed to be
telling me all your bad stuff.” Her smile has the most candidly con-niving sort of expression, as if they have just decided upon a secret place to meet. It makes Butterfield’s blood rise. He looks down into the pale whiskey in his glass, wondering if he has imagined everything. She’s pouring a refill for the young man, and Butterfield watches her, unable to look away.

  Fiona comes unsteadily back down the bar and looks at him. “I’ll come home with you. To your house.”

  “All right,” he tells her.

  “Stay with you ’til he’s finished the work.”

  He decides not to argue with her now. He knows that, as all the books and pamphlets say, he would only be arguing with the whiskey.

  He pays the bill, giving Ariana a large tip. He watches her move to the cash register, gazing at her legs and then taking his eyes away. He has never been the type. The whole thing makes him uneasy.

  “Take care,” she says as he and Fiona move to the door.

  Outside, the old woman sings softly, walking along, head-down, apparently no longer aware that she’s accompanied. She walks to the Subaru, and then turns. “My purse.”

  It’s on her arm, hanging from her elbow.

  “Come on,” he says to her, taking hold of her other arm. “Remember? You’re coming with me.”

  She lets him lead her to his car, and then stops, resists. When she speaks, it is unintelligible: “I’m not g’n d’ba.”

  He opens the door, gets her in and seated. She sighs and begins to mutter again. “Never loved me.”

  From inside Macbeth’s, the bagpipes moan again. From here, it sounds like some sort of calamity. Butterfield walks around the car in the cooling night and gets in behind the wheel. His great-aunt is asleep on the passenger side, her head leaning against the closed window.

  When he shuts the door, she stirs, looks around. “Where’s Holly?”

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  “Go on back to sleep,” he tells her.

  “Have t’talk t’Holly.”

  “We’ll go there.”

  A little later, as he’s pulling out of the lot, she says, “If I ask you to stop, will you stop?”

  “If you ask me,” he says, annoyed with her.

  “Will?”

  “Go to sleep,” he says.

  “Please can you stop?”

  He pulls to the side of the road, and she sits there for a time. Then she sighs. “Think you can come around here and open the door?”

  He gets out and makes his way around the car, realizing that he’s probably a little over the line himself now. He opens her door, and barely catches her by the arms. They stagger to the grass, where she sits down in her dress and looks around as if surprised. “Damn,” she says. “I thought I was gon’ be sick. Not sick. Help me up.” He does so, again having to hold her under the arms. Carefully, he drags her back to the car and gets her in and settled again. “Na’ sick,” she says.

  “Good.”

  He drives to his own house, where Elizabeth is waiting, sitting at the window in the living room, holding a wet rag on her forehead and looking worried. She frowns through the glass, watching Butterfield bring the old woman up the walk. The fact that she doesn’t get up to open the door is noteworthy. She wants nothing to do with this, what this is: Fiona on the rampage, the Crazies fighting again. He helps his great-aunt inside, and she walks unsteadily over to Elizabeth, badly affecting surprise and gladness to see her. “Well, look’a you. Wait’n up for us, sweetie.” She offers a hug, cooing, as if Elizabeth is a very small child.

  Elizabeth takes the hug and glares over Fiona’s narrow shoulder at her husband.

  “Where do I sleep?” Fiona asks. “Let’s have a li’l drinky-poo.”

  “I’ll take you home,” Elizabeth says. “Holly’s been calling. She’s frantic.”

  Fiona appears rather stunned for a second, then begins again her low, muttering tirade from the bar.

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  Elizabeth says to Butterfield, in a brittle voice just this side of song,

  “Take care of this. I’m not going to stand for this.”

  “What do you want me to do?” he sings back.

  “Fiona,” Elizabeth says. “I’m going to take you home now. Holly’s waiting up for you.”

  Butterfield has the old woman by the arms again, because she appears about to keel over. But she’s turning, as if looking around for her antagonist.

  “Not go’in anywhere I don’ want to,” she says. “Right, Will?”

  Elizabeth looks at her husband. “If you don’t do something about this I’m going to scream bloody murder I swear.”

  “Don’t scream,” Fiona says. “S’not ladylike. I used to teach in finishing school. Not p’lite to scream. Frowned on. Believe me, I’m certain of it.”

  “Will,” Elizabeth says, sings.

  “I had too much to drink,” says Fiona. “I’m sorry. Holly’s worried.”

  All of this is spoken with a precision that seems like an affectation after the slurring of only a second ago. The speculation arrives in Butterfield’s mind: an instant’s integrated thought: she has sobered up enough to do this, or she has been affecting the drunkenness in the first place, or has reached some zone of intoxication beyond the normal patterns and come to a kind of full circle. There is no telling with Fiona. She goes limp now, eyes closed, head down, either unconscious or feigning unconsciousness.

  Both Butterfield and his wife drag her to the car and work together to get her into it. She lies across the back seat, silent, eyes shut, mouth open, looking almost harmless. Elizabeth points this out.

  “Be quiet,” Butterfield says. “She’ll hear you.”

  “I don’t care if she does.”

  They both drive the two blocks to the other house and work together to get her up the walk and onto the porch. Holly’s standing there, holding the door. She’s in a nightgown and slippers, and her hair is pulled up into a knot on the crown of her head. There are combs in the knot, which look like chopsticks. She’s wearing her glasses and has a book under her arm. “Where the hell is the car?” she says. “I’m gonna need that car in the morning.”

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  “Elizabeth’ll take me to Macbeth’s and I’ll bring it back,” Butterfield tells her.

  “Tonight,” Holly says definitely. “You poor man.”

  3.

  Neither of them says a word on the way to Macbeth’s. Elizabeth drives.

  The night is clouding over, cold now. The moon seems to be flying among the dark-edged clouds. At Macbeth’s, she pulls next to the little red car and stops. The side doors and two front fenders are, in fact, slightly lighter in color than the rest of the car; it shows in this parking-lot light. For a little while, they sit there in the sound of the idling engine. With the first Elizabeth, there were often these moments of a kind of pained waiting for one of them to speak—whenever there was any kind of tension between them, he always sought to find fault with himself, being naturally disinclined to self-justification. Something about the gestures of self-justification put him off, as if the people who had fallen into the habit of it were doomed to repeat other failings—lies and cheating and dullness of mind. Now, he feels something of this, and wishes to put it aside, since it calls up unpleasant memories and is part of what he perceives as his general failure with the first Elizabeth. He says, “Listen. I’m really sorry, you know. But I don’t really have much choice here.”

  She almost moans, “I hate this.”

  He sighs, gets out of the car, and pauses, feeling the need to say something more, though nothing specific comes to mind. It’s all so much like the other times, and he has an image of this wife also driving away and never coming back. She does drive off, of course, tires squealing when she makes the turn out of the lot. He watches until the lights disappear beyond the far row of buildings. She’s headed home.

  He’s alone in t
he quiet, desolate, sensing himself to be less than any of them require—any of the women in his life. All the complications seem like aspects of one overriding problem: himself. And yet he hates 142

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  such self-absorbed thoughts, and, as if in reaction to this brief indulgence in them, he shivers slightly. The chill in the air contributes to the feeling.

  The wind has a bite to it now, is a good ten degrees colder. There’s the sound of his shoes on the asphalt, and now he hears again the muffled notes of the bagpipes in Macbeth’s, something vaguely less brisk about it, as if the player has reached the end of his endurance. It fades on a bad series of squawks.

  He thinks of Ariana and walks to the entrance and in, telling himself that he should probably apologize to her for anything rude Fiona might’ve said. A part of him is perfectly aware of the rationalization that this inescapably is, but he puts this away as a negative thought.

  The action of pulling the door toward himself and stepping through it shuts down any hesitation or introspection. She’s at the cash register; the bagpipe man is struggling through the entrance of the little side room at that end. The place is almost empty now. Butterfield walks over to the bar and sits down. Ariana sees him, a glance and a smile, going about counting change and then wiping down the surface. He can’t help staring. But it’s a flirtation, nothing less. He wants more of her, more talk, more watching her movements.

  She walks over with a shot of the McCallum. “On the house,” she says. “Good to see you again.”

  “I had to pick up Fiona’s car.”

  “Interesting lady.” That smile.

  “So you grew up in France?”

  “Oui,” she says with an ironic little twist of her mouth. “My father worked at the embassy when I was little. He was in what I believe they still call service. You know?”

  “You mean—”

  She nods. “Butler. Right. I went to a school for the American children. But he left that business. He’s got his own business now. Did you ever see the movie Sabrina?”