Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  “It was good, baby,” Ariana says through a sigh. “Can someone turn the music off now?”

  Will does so.

  “I’ve got a blistering headache,” she says, eyes still closed.

  236

  Richard Bausch

  “I know what to do for a headache,” Shostakovich says, and, with a strange, clumsy leap, he’s standing on his hands in the middle of the room. Change, a wallet and a comb, a book of matches and a butane lighter fall out of his pockets. The coins clatter and roll in all directions from him, as if trying to get away from such a breech of decorum.

  “Sorry,” he says. “I’ll pick it all up.” He hand-walks a couple of paces toward the stereo, his legs surprisingly straight. But he’s drunk, and, as he begins to topple, Ariana rushes to him and grabs him by the lower legs. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Wait just a goddamn minute, will you?” They look for an instant like a dance team in the middle of a bizarre stunt gone wrong, and then he comes down with a thud and crawls to the couch, where he sits with his head in his hands. “Jesus, Ariana, we were just having fun. I played the fucking sax. I was a gymnast—you guys—really.”

  Elizabeth moves to the other room with the plate of cheese and crackers, thinking that the feeling now is exactly what it would be if they had all just witnessed an accident. She can barely draw breath, she’s so weary. Now it’s quiet in the other room, and she walks in to find that Ariana and her husband are both in the foyer, getting into their coats.

  “I’m so sorry,” says Ariana.

  “My sax,” Shostakovich says.

  Elizabeth hurries to it, closes it up in its case, and, when she returns to the foyer, she sees that the tableau is unchanged; no one has moved.

  Ariana is looking at Will again, with that familiar, upsetting gaze. Elizabeth thinks she sees the other woman catch herself and look away.

  “Thanks for dinner,” Shostakovich says. “I’m really sorry.”

  The Butterfields say, in unison, “Good night.” And Elizabeth closes the door. She leans into it, resting her head on her hands.

  Will goes into the kitchen and runs water. She moves to the entrance and stands there, watching him. It’s almost as if she were a biologist observing some separate species. There’s an unappealing, vaguely raccoon-like way he washes his hands. Finished with that, he retrieves a water glass from the cabinet and, filling it, drinks. “Damn,” he says. “That got strange.”

  She feels something shaking from its moorings inside her, a worri-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

  237

  some, unresolved pang. She takes him by the arm and leads him to the bedroom. They’ll leave the mess for the morning. He flops down on the bed and stares at the ceiling.

  She decides to say something light: “Boy, you can tell Shostakovich is no relation.”

  His face is a blank.

  “To the Russian composer.”

  “Oh—right. I know.”

  “Well you looked like you didn’t get it.”

  He sighs. “Weird.” Then: “I think you were right about them being a nightmare. What do you think?”

  She shrugs but doesn’t answer. Then, quite suddenly, she knows she will find out the truth. And, as is so often the case in matters of love, she will have to tell a lie in order to arrive at it. “Ariana said she’s stopped by the store a couple times.”

  He gives her a look, a quick glance, guilty as all the legions of hell.

  “Did she?” He nods, pretending a casual inability to remember the thing that is written across his face like a brand. “Oh, yeah. I guess she has. Not recently, though.”

  Elizabeth goes into the bathroom and closes the door, then washes her face and looks at herself in the mirror. She remembers how the first Elizabeth wrote on a mirror and disappeared. He’s moving around on the other side of the door.

  “You okay?” he says.

  “No,” she murmurs under her breath. Aloud, she says, “What?”

  “Are you okay.”

  She runs the water again and doesn’t answer. Finally, when she has mastered herself, she opens the door. He’s standing there. “Everything all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t everything be all right?”

  “You seem a little worried or something. It was such a weird night.”

  “I’m too tired to think.”

  “Too tired to make love?”

  Bands of rage tighten under her heart. “A little,” she says.

  “Meaning?”

  238

  Richard Bausch

  “Okay, Will. I’m too tired to make love.”

  He sighs. “Are you mad at me about something?”

  It’s all she can do to keep from striking him. “No. Why?”

  “I guess we’re just tired. It was kind of nice though, wasn’t it?—no Crazies. A nice free-feeling night for a while.”

  He’s trying to humor her. It’s infuriating. Quite clearly, he was miserable the whole evening, and now she’s glad of that, anyway. She removes her blouse, crossing the room, thinking that the Crazies, who have been such trouble, now seem entirely trivial as a subject for worry.

  The windows are open for the stuffiness of the room—she opened them upon first stepping in here, because of the sense of suffocation that had seized her—and now the whole chilly night seems to be screeching with life: the rush and whoosh of the city; the call and ruckus in the trees, birds in their continual predawn chattering, such a blind cacophony of procreation and increase. It sickens her to think of it. He’s gone into the bathroom, and she hears him brushing his teeth. She gets in bed, pulling the blankets high. She knows, suddenly and with a sinking in her soul, that she won’t get to sleep any time soon.

  He comes out of the bathroom and flops down beside her with a deep sigh. It takes him a moment to get himself situated under the blankets, a lot of shifting and turning. Finally, he lies with his hands at his sides, very still, staring at the ceiling.

  “Something wrong?” she says.

  “I won’t sleep.”

  She makes herself kiss the side of his face. There isn’t anything else she can do. “Good night,” she says.

  “You mind if I read?”

  “No.”

  But he doesn’t move, and soon he’s gone—the wine and the dope and the food, and whatever he’s had to do to keep up his pretense of innocence, of life as it has been until now, shuts him down like an engine out of fuel. He sleeps, and snores, turns over on his side away from her.

  She reaches across him and turns out the light, and waits in the darkness for her own nerves to shut down. Nothing. She sighs, and then sighs again, and then leans up and looks at the shape of him lying there in the t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

  239

  dark. She moves close and brings her knee up, hard, into his tailbone.

  He comes out of his stupor with a cough. “What?” he says. “What?”

  “Oh,” she says. “Did you have a dream?”

  “Jesus Christ,” he says. “Did you kick me?”

  “No. You woke me up.”

  “What the fuck,” he says. “Elizabeth?”

  “Honey, you’re having bad dreams.”

  “You kicked me,” he says.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Move over will you?”

  She does so. “I’m sorry.”

  He says nothing.

  “Are you all right?” she asks. “You keep jumping.”

  “I swear I got hit. I think you’re the one who’s dreaming.”

  Now she’s quiet, and, in a little while, he’s asleep again, snoring again. She closes her eyes, feeling sophomoric, childish, remembering Holly with the saucepan of warm water and Fiona asleep in the hammock on the porch. Well, all right. There’s a measure of relief in this kind of juvenile trick.

  But she can’t sleep. She lies still, crying quietly, listening to him breathe and gurgle and snore, glancing over at the shape of him in the dimness. The chain of thought leads
her to wondering what she will do now, where she might go, how things might change. She thinks of being gone by the weekend, of moving out, or asking him to move out.

  She also entertains the thought of keeping what she knows to herself, giving him a chance to come back from it, to see the mistake he has made. But this idea fills her with fury. She wants to strike out at him again. How dare he? She turns in the bed and looks at him once more.

  The possibility occurs to her that she has misread everything, that he has only, so far, been tempted. It’s entirely possible that he has warded it off and is, in fact, innocent. She wants to believe this because she loves him and because he has never given her cause to wonder before. And she has to admit that there’s something unsettlingly forward about Ariana Bromberg, which would set any man’s nerves on edge and might make any man act guilty. She feels a wave of contrition now for having kneed 240

  Richard Bausch

  him, and she snuggles close, breathing into the curve of his shoulders.

  But she can’t sleep. The images go through her mind—the possible guilty scenarios.

  There’s light showing in the window from the next-door house. She gets up to close the curtain, and then stands there staring out at it. All the lights are on over there. Every one.

  w i n t e r h i s t o r y

  1.

  Point Royal is a place where presidents used to come to relax from the stresses of Washington. Though it is only fifty miles south and west of the city, it is protected by mountains and sealed off by tradition from the incessant turmoil on the other side of the Potomac. The local joke about it is that every president has come to its remote-seeming hills and mountain-valley peacefulness to refresh and refurbish himself, except the two who needed it most: Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. Lincoln, because he couldn’t (although it changed hands a half-dozen times, it was usually in the hands of the enemy—or, as Lincoln would have put it, the rebellion); and poor Johnson because Kennedy had spent so much and such famous time there during his presidency, and Texas beckoned anyway.

  Saint Augustine’s is its oldest Catholic church, and one of the oldest churches in Virginia. Built in seventeen fifty-two as a small frame-building with a cellar and a steeple with a bell, and not much else, it was used for a time by Clara Barton during the second battle of Manassas, or second Bull Run, as it is called by the citizens of the area. A small, blue sign commemorates this event, and the little cemetery that 242

  Richard Bausch

  flanks it contains some of the dead of that battle. One can walk among the stones and find graves as recent as last month (Mrs. Minnie Ells-worth, one hundred and nine years old), and as early as seventeen sixty-three (Thomas Hyatt, thirty-one, of the milk sick—that, too, is on the stone). In nineteen sixty-eight, in a misguided fit of flaccid, summer-of-love ecumenism, the name was changed to Our Lady of the Mountains, but it never took. Adults persisted in calling it Saint Augustine’s, and their children kept it up, and, in nineteen eighty-two, the old plaque with its raised wooden letters and its bas-relief of the saint placidly scrutinizing all passersby was resurrected from the debris of old pews, falling-apart hymnals, and chipped icons in the basement. The parish was expanding—the new developments and the shopping malls spreading west from the glut of Arlington and Fairfax. An extension of the main building was erected in nineteen eighty-six, but then the expan-sion ceased—a casualty of the housing bust in nineteen eighty-nine—

  and so plans for a school that kept getting moved forward into what everyone called the “near” future were indefinitely suspended.

  Since nineteen ninety-four, there has been no mention of it at all.

  And sometimes the present pastor of the church has the unpleasant intuition that his place here is only stopgap, that he represents someone to watch over things until a final decision can be made about the future.

  This morning, at breakfast, after the seven o’clock mass, he listens to his curate chatter happily about plans for the day. Father McFadden chomps his granola, slurping the milk like a child. In the afternoon, his father is coming for a visit, driving through on his way to Florida, where he spends his winters. The old man is a former pro soccer player, of which Father McFadden is quite proud. The young priest has got fifteen boys interested on his CYO football team, the Tigers, and his father is going to speak to them.

  Brother Fire is fasting, waiting until he’s through with the twelve-thirty mass, and he sits with his prayer book and makes notes on a yellow pad for the morning’s homily. The subject is faith. He’s thinking about Mr. Petit and his sad obsession, and he wants to put something in about how the whole universe is yearning toward God.

  Father McFadden has placed two more of his poems on the table, and the older priest knows quite well what is expected. He can’t bring him-t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

  243

  self to reach for them, yet knows that he will, that before the hour is up, he just will. Even the smallest lie gets you into trouble: he should’ve spoken truthfully to the younger man on first seeing his verse. But that would have hurt him; the poems are so important to him, and it is, after all, the sincerest expression of his faith.

  “A Mr. Petit called for you, this morning while you were out for your walk,” Father McFadden says now, slurping the last of the milk from his bowl. “I’m sorry, I forgot to mention it.”

  “Did he want me to call him at home?”

  “He asked for you and when I told him you had gone for a walk, he hung up. He was really rather rude, I must say.”

  The old priest remains silent. On the table before him are the poems, and Father McFadden watches him.

  “I’ll be back,” Brother Fire says and goes to the phone in the hallway.

  There’s no answer at Mr. Petit’s house. Disappointed, and feeling that as a failure, as part of his ongoing problem with morbid curiosity, he returns to the table, where Father McFadden sits reading one of the poems, murmuring to himself the syllables of his love.

  Brother Fire, because he feels he must, picks up the other one.

  l o r d m y h e a r t i s f u l l I believe I’m capable

  With the help of thy grace

  To amend my commonplace

  Life and change the face

  Of my soul in the race

  Like running from a bull

  With my eyes covered by wool

  To succeed in finding space

  Against the devil’s pull.

  Good Lord.

  Brother Fire realizes that there is nothing he can say about this, short of telling the other man to try his hand at, well, anything else. A phrase 244

  Richard Bausch

  occurs to him: “Father McFadden, I believe it’s best if you try avoiding language altogether.” He can’t control the little half-smile that comes to his face with the thought, and he turns away from the younger man, lest he see it. Father McFadden stares, a deep frown of concentration and worry on his face.

  “What do you think?” he asks, offering the other poem. “Maybe take a look at this one before you say anything.”

  The old priest takes it and turns again. This is a revision of an earlier one:

  There were no laughs at all on Calvary that day.

  That was when the devil had his way

  There were no children happily at play

  No warm songs in the merry month of May No pretty feelings parading on display

  No chance for any goodness to have its sway While all the cruelties of the nails and gray Spikes making wounds that evermore would stay Ran through

  Our Lord’s hands. Oh now let us pray

  Forgive them Dear Father for not knowing what they Ever do,

  And forgive us too

  For all we do

  And say

  We are sinful creatures with our feet made of clay Who howl in the night like dogs that howl at bay And know that death is sin’s poor meager pay.

  There are four more lines, ending in nay, bray, gay, and nei
gh, but he can’t read further, or he will break out laughing. He has to fight the urge now. He stares at the blank bottom of the page, trying to keep the explosion back, feeling it rise almost like choking in his throat.

  “As I think I told you, I’m experimenting with different rhyming patterns,” says Father McFadden. “This one starts out just straight t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

  245

  AAAAA, and so on. But then I saw the B pattern in the middle of it, and made the shorter lines with this. The next stanza, which I haven’t written yet, will be BBBB. Like that. And I hope it’ll have a shift to CCCC with shorter lines again.”

  Brother Fire nods, concentrating all of his power of will in the effort not to giggle. He likes this young man. He also approves of his gentle belief in others, his enthusiasm, and his courage in battling his own perceived shortcomings. It’s the simplest thing, to tell a truth, isn’t it? But there’s the expectation—and also the most tender hint of fear—in Father McFadden’s eyes as he waits for the approval he needs.

  “Do you read poetry?” the old priest asks.

  “I have a Gerard Manley Hopkins book. Well, it’s a biography.”

  “But do you read any poetry?”

  Father McFadden shakes his head a little sadly. “No.” Then, sitting up brightly, a new idea, something he can try. “I should, shouldn’t I?”

  “Well, I think you might find it helpful.”

  “Helpful.” Heavy doubt darkens the younger man’s gaze.

  “The way all poets do, Father. They read each other, you see.”

  “Yes, of course. I see, yes.”

  “Well,” Brother Fire says at last. “As I said, I don’t know anything about poetry. But this seems very deeply felt.” He sees relief in the other’s eyes, and, so, he strikes the note again. “Yes, I’d say very deeply felt.

  Very sincere.”

  “Thank you,” says Father McFadden. “But then, you know, Father, Hitler was sincere.”

  “I think that’s being debated, isn’t it? There’s a school of thought that paints him as an evil opportunist.”

  “Well, but a sincere one. You—you see how I mean this?”

  Brother Fire resists the impulse to be short with him. He feigns confusion: “Did Adolf Hitler write poetry?”