Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  And the most hands-on aspect of her present involvement with the world is these dolls she works so assiduously to perfect in the late-night hours, when sleep is an evasive ghost, just gliding away across the next acre of night.

  “How was school yesterday?” She was on shift last afternoon and night.

  “In English, we had to write about weather. I was a bit dubious about it, but it turned out to be rather exhilarating.”

  It’s as if he sits up nights searching the dictionary for words and planning how to bring about the contexts in which to use them. The simple fact is that he loves to read, and his reading finds its way directly into all his thoughts and expressions. She’s always very careful not to show any awkwardness with him when, serious and in gentle earnest-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  ness, he spouts some ornate phrase, her sweet, odd boy. “How is it generally this year?” she asks him.

  “I’m liking math a little better.”

  “You and math getting along now?” She’s quite pleased now that she spoke to Mr. Petit.

  “I’ve been staying after class for a half hour each day instead of going to study hall, and Mr. Petit helps me with it. It’s actually fun when you understand it.”

  “Most things are better when you understand, yes.”

  The boy shakes his head. “You don’t have to turn it into a life lesson, Ma.”

  “I wasn’t doing that.” Now and then, he reminds her unpleasantly of his father.

  “I think Mrs. Butterfield’s rather engaging.”

  “You mean nice? I like her too, by the way. We had a good talk.”

  “I think she’s engaging,” the boy insists. Then he goes on into his room.

  3.

  The night she told Teddy she was pregnant with Kalie, he went out and didn’t come back for several hours. He told her that he felt like taking a walk to clear his head. But the next morning, he said he didn’t want another child, and asked her politely, as if this were a thing that could be negotiated like a redistribution of tasks, to do something about it. She threw a dish at his head, and the dish broke on the wall. They laughed about this incident later in her pregnancy, but there was always the sense that it could ignite another quarrel. He left the first time shortly after Kalie was born. That lasted three months. He came back; he tried. He went to work and came home and he was polite to Oliver and he played with the children. Something was missing all the time.

  The days went by in a kind of haze for Alison, and the nights were long.

  She took the job with the police force, went through the training, and 176

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  Teddy drifted farther and farther away. The children were able to recognize the feeling, of course, even if they couldn’t name it. Something was bothering Daddy. Daddy was always distracted and quiet around them, and his forbearance for noise and confusion shrank. It became harder and harder for Alison to find anything of the humorous man with whom she had fallen in love. And his distraction extended to the bedroom. From the beginning, she had delighted in making love, having discovered in herself a surprising enthusiasm for it. But as the year of Kalie’s infancy wore on, and Teddy’s unease in the house increased, her joyous feelings began to wane. Lovemaking began to feel like something they were doing by rote, without much thought or attention to any element of it.

  The whole performance was demoralizing, and the tension grew. They began quarreling over things far away from their intimacy, and there were times when she was quite happy to have him out of the house. And quite happy, herself, to have shift work at night.

  Finally, almost two years ago now, he left again, this time for good.

  Even so, she feels no animosity toward him—he’s a boy, like Gregory, and, for that matter, like Jonathan and, she has to admit to herself, Oliver, too. And while she has often laughed at Marge’s funny tirades about Gregory, and added her own comments about her husband, she has always been tolerant of the boyishness in men, since it has been the largest element of her own experience with Oliver. Moreover, she half-believes men are simply not equipped with the necessary organs of understanding the practical requirements of life. She sees in this an explication of all sorts of bright accomplishment in the world: men lead adventurous lives out of a failure to perceive what sensible matters oppose their schemes and plans. She knows it’s far more complicated than this, of course. Yet it helps her keep an inner truce with herself concerning her ex-husband’s failures.

  Now she goes to the bedroom door to check on the children. Kalie’s rocking happily, sleepily, in the easy chair under the window, her favorite, a big, wine-colored anchor of a chair. Her hands are closed on the arms of it, and a small line of drool has come down from her perfect mouth. Jonathan’s sitting cross-legged on her bed, paging through one of her Animorphs books.

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  “Honey,” she says. “You want some relief ?”

  “I’m fine,” he says. “I like to watch her.”

  She walks over to him and stands for a moment. When he looks up, he smiles, but there’s something forced about it. “You seem sad, lately,”

  she says.

  “No.” His tone is flat and simple. Perhaps there’s the faintest question in it.

  “Jonathan, you can tell me how you are. You don’t have to keep everything to yourself.”

  “I’m fine,” he says. But his gaze travels away from her.

  “Is it something at school?”

  “Mother, please.”

  She bends down and kisses his forehead, then goes over and kisses Kalie on her cheek. “I’ll be in the other room,” she says.

  She paints for a few minutes, then puts everything away and washes her hands. Standing at the bathroom sink, she pulls a brush through her hair, noting the shadows under her eyes and the fatigued cast of her face.

  “Gorgeous,” she says sardonically, because, like most lovely women, she can’t see her own best qualities. There’s no vanity in her, nor any duplic-ity, either. She sees what she sees, and the problem is that what she sees is a wide mouth and a too-rounded chin, and eyes the color of old wood.

  She’s in the living room when Greg comes to the door. He knocks and waits, hands folded in front. This is the first time since Marge left, and, even so, Alison’s unsurprised. When she opens the door, she breathes the cologne he has put on his cheeks. He’s the sort of man who wears monogrammed shirts and always has four or five silver pens with his name on them. Wiry, small, and lean, with a hook nose and black hair that he never combs, as a matter of style; his small eyes are a pretty green. The eyes were what drew Marge to him in the first place.

  “I wanted to see how you’re doing,” he says.

  “I’m doing just dandy,” she says.

  “I’ve been thinking about you,” he tells her. It’s as if he’s bestowing this on her. “So, you know, if you feel you need anything.”

  “And what would I need, Gregory?”

  He smiles. “Whatever.”

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  “I don’t need a thing.”

  “Well, I’m here.”

  She waits for him to leave. And when he doesn’t, she starts to close the door. “I’m just concerned for you,” he says. “Really. I know it gets lonely. Boy do I know.”

  “I can’t believe you,” she says. “Go away before I find some pretext to arrest you. Your wife’s pregnant, remember?”

  “She’s in another time zone.”

  “Go away, Gregory,” she says. “Go home and water your lawn.”

  He’s about to say something else, but she closes the door quietly in his face. Not five minutes later, the telephone rings. It crosses her mind that Gregory has gone home and decided to try her over the telephone.

  It’s Fiona, quite shaky-sounding. “Alison, something’s happened.”

  “Fiona?” Alison says, thinking: Not now, oh, God. Please. Not now.
r />   Then she says: “It’s Oliver, isn’t it.”

  “You need somebody to come get you?” Fiona says.

  4.

  Brother Fire is called to the hospital to administer the last rites to Oliver Ward. It’s Fiona who calls him. Fiona indicates that time is of the essence. The hospital chaplain is not there, she says, and Oliver Ward may already be gone. The old priest is close by, can he please come? Yes.

  Of course. He hurries out to the car and barks his left knee getting into it. He drives himself to the hospital in a welter of pain. There’s traffic; a minor accident, a fender bender, gawkers slowing to look at it. No one is hurt, and Brother Fire has an unpleasant sense of the precariousness of everything, going by, as if the whole edifice of his faith might collapse in the next instant, the world pressing in on him with its remorseless-ness, like a terrible, blank wall. He murmurs a prayer and can’t feel the words; they are sounds issuing from his lips, from the mouth of a thing brought forth out of chaos and randomness. He tries to pray again. Our Father who art in Heaven. It’s no use. Waiting behind a truck with its t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  dirty backside and one broken taillight, he repeats the words, says the prayer anyway, tries to empty his mind, tries to call up the old joy, thinks of Aquinas, and receives an image of himself enjoying a peaceful night with wine; oh, if he could find something now, here, to cut this darkness that has descended upon him. Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief.

  At the hospital, he heads toward the emergency-room entrance, where he encounters Holly and a young woman he has seen before, whom Holly introduces as Alison; and also Alison’s children, coming from the opposite side of the parking lot. Alison has been crying. “I’m so sorry,” he says to her.

  “Is he gone?” Alison says in fright, staring at the cruet of oil and the book he’s carrying.

  “I’m just arriving myself,” says the priest. “Fiona called me.”

  They go inside. Fiona’s sitting in one of the vinyl chairs along the wall. She rises and approaches.

  “No news,” she says. “But it’s a stroke.”

  “Oh, God,” says Alison.

  “All we can do is wait.”

  Alison moves to one of the chairs, turns, and seems to collapse there, putting her hands to her face, rocking slowly. “Mommy,” says Kalie, “is Granddaddy dead?”

  “No,” Alison says to her. “Please, baby. Sit here for Mommy and be quiet.”

  Fiona sits down and extends one thin arm over Alison’s shoulder, leaning in, murmuring something.

  Holly takes the priest by the elbow. “We don’t know a thing, John.

  You know Fiona.”

  “I’m not needed?”

  “Not in the way you must’ve thought.”

  He limps back out to the car and puts the sacramental oil and the book on the front seat. The car feels to him like a chamber, the place where he was set upon by those black thoughts. He closes the door and turns from it, braces himself for what will be needed. Back in the waiting room, he sits with Alison for a few minutes. The boy Jonathan has 180

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  a coughing fit, and Kalie, restless, begins to cry and protest being held.

  The two old ladies try to help. Brother Fire thinks of the confusions and muddle of family life, and feels like a fugitive, someone in hiding.

  There’s this badness in his soul that causes him to rise and walk over to the water fountain, where he drinks and tries to tamp down the fright, the dark. A numbness has begun to spread in the center of him, in his bones. There’s now, inside him, only the sense of having failed these people and everyone, and himself. Then he sees the selfishness of the concern, and his own recoiling mind makes him wince. If I contend with thee, oh Lord.

  Holly walks over to him. “You all right?”

  “I’m a bit shaky,” he tells her, because she’s his friend and will understand.

  5.

  On her way to The Heart’s Ease bookstore, Elizabeth sees six-foot-ten-inch Calvin Reed walking along the side of the road, head down, everything about him sagging, as if the force of gravity were twice as strong for him and him alone. She slows the car and gives a light tap to the horn, which he either ignores or doesn’t hear. So, she stops and stands out of the car, and calls to him: “Calvin.”

  No response.

  She calls louder: “Calvin.”

  Now he stops and turns and seems to peer doubtfully at her.

  “What?”

  “Where’re you headed?”

  “Home.”

  She wants to tell him to pull his pants up. Stand straight. Stop walking around like someone half-awake; stop being so strange. Stride through the world with some sense of his uniqueness, with some self-regard. In an age when the whole culture is in thrall to that very idea, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  when people are encouraged to be as grasping and selfish and vain as their most fugitive greedy whim, she finds his hangdog inferiority-complex annoying. There seems something almost willful about it. But she says none of this. Instead, she asks if he needs a lift.

  He shrugs.

  “It’s not a complicated question, Calvin.”

  He ambles over, looking down—someone being compelled to do something he wishes not to do. He opens the car door and scrunches down in the seat, getting his long legs in, and closes the door with a quiet click, as though he’s afraid of making too much noise. She pulls her own door shut and looks back to check oncoming traffic, talking over her shoulder. “How far is it?”

  “Mile,” he says. “Mile and a half.”

  “Do I go straight?”

  “I’ll tell you when to turn.”

  She pulls out, and, for a minute or so, they’re quiet. He’s very still; big, flat-fingered hands lying open in his lap. Out of the corner of her eye, his floppy apparel makes him look like a mountainous sack of dirty laundry. And, indeed, an odor of overripe fruit rises from him. “How long have you been with your uncle?”

  “Not long.”

  She glances over at him. He’s looking at his fingers. The world out -

  side the window holds no interest for him.

  “Have you been to see a friend? Or down at the recreation center?”

  “The mall.”

  “Fairfield?”

  “The Arcade.”

  “What’s your favorite video game?”

  “Commando. You get to shoot everything in sight.”

  “I used to be good at Pac-Man.”

  He shrugs. “Turn right at the light.”

  She comes to the light and does so, and he says, “Third house on the right.”

  She stops in front of the house. The uncle is out in the yard, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and gloves, wielding a weed trimmer, cut-182

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  ting the crabgrass along the border of the sidewalk. During the parent-teacher conference, he just stared as she spoke of Calvin’s difficulties. It’s going to be another long year with Calvin. He gets out of the car, muttering “Thank you,” and crosses to the door of the house and goes in. He doesn’t look back. He seems unaware of the uncle, who appears equally unaware of him—they might as well be shadows crossing in two different realms.

  Elizabeth waits a moment, intending to wave at the uncle, but he never does look over at her, and so she pulls away, drives down to the end of the street and turns around. Coming back, she slows, and he’s still working along—and in the house, she knows, is Calvin, alone.

  The Heart’s Ease bookstore is only a couple miles farther on, and she drives there in a funk, a restlessness that she can’t quite understand or explain to herself.

  When she and Butterfield were first together, and Mark and Gail were still children, she tried to give them whatever they needed most, which, often enough, seemed to be a sort of benign neglect. That is, they communicated by word and deed, and sometimes by plain omission of these things, that they wished to be le
ft to their own devices. Elizabeth found herself acting as a referee now and then when conflicts arose—a go-between, for both of the children and for their father.

  This turned out to be especially so when Gail married so young; Elizabeth, half-consciously seeing it as an opportunity to get closer to the girl, sided with her against Will’s determination that the marriage was a mistake. But Gail let it be known that she could fight her own battles.

  “I don’t need permission from you,” she said to her father. “I don’t need anybody’s approval about it.” This was said at the top of her voice in the kitchen, the night before the wedding. Elizabeth took a step back then, as she would later explain it to Will, who claimed that the statement had nothing to do with her. But Elizabeth heard the notes in her stepdaughter’s voice. Notes she sometimes believes only another woman can hear.

  At any rate, when she expressed to Will her wish not to be placed between him and his children, not to be utilized in this fashion, things t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  settled into the phase they have mostly been in since Gail left to study English at Temple. Guardedly cordial. And she hates it without being able to see the slightest window of a way through it to something more.

  It’s all perfectly understandable, though, and she has never been the type to require more than people seem able to give: back then, neither of the children wanted reminders of what had happened in their young lives; they had their memories of their mother. They were close to their father. The world they lived in happened to them, and Elizabeth, at first—she knows this now, and she sensed it painfully then—amounted to another change. Back then, she was troubled by the idea that they already were a family: Will and Gail and the moody boy. There were so many passes with Mark and his sleepwalking—night terrors, the doctor called it; Elizabeth had never heard the term used before—and this poor boy’s fractured sense of dependable reality. He trusted nothing. Nothing. A school bus ride, a walk across a little field, a friend waving from the other side of a street—none of it had any kind of solidness to him.