Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  You’re fine here.” Then she lightly pats the girl’s back until she’s gone to sleep.

  “Mom?” Jonathan calls.

  She strides in to him with the thought that, at almost fifteen, he ought to be able to be alone a little, ought not to be clinging so tightly to his mother. “What,” she says, not quite keeping the annoyance out of her voice.

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  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” he says.

  She bends down and kisses his forehead. He feels feverish. She puts the back of her hand to the flesh there, and then takes his hands into her own. “Do you feel all right?”

  He’s gone back to sleep.

  “Son?” Again, she kisses his forehead.

  “I’m going out for a pass,” he says. Then he sits bolt upright in the bed, and a belch issues from him. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Do you want to go to the bathroom?”

  “No,” he says, sitting there, holding on.

  “Do you feel like you’re gonna be sick?”

  He shakes his head doubtfully.

  “Come on,” she says. “The bathroom.”

  “No.” He breathes, then settles again in the bed. “I just had to burp.”

  “You’re all right? You feel a little hot.”

  “I’m okay. I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”

  She feels his forehead again. It’s still warmer than she’d like. “I’m going to take your temperature.” She goes into the hall and opens the medicine cabinet. Stanley is still in the living room, with the book of photographs across his lap. He looks up. “Can I do anything?”

  She shrugs at him and holds up the thermometer.

  “Let me know,” he says. “I’m right here.”

  Back in Jonathan’s room, she puts the thermometer in the boy’s mouth and sits waiting for it to beep, while Jonathan keeps his eyes closed and seems to drift. She holds the thermometer in its place. Kalie cries from her room, a little plaint but loud enough, and it continues.

  She’s either had a nightmare or is sick, too. Alison starts to rise, but then Stanley crosses the hall, and she hears him soothing the little girl, hears him humming something soft to her. The thermometer beeps. She takes it out of Jonathan’s mouth and looks at it. Ninety-eight-point-nine. So, there’s no fever. Three-tenths of a point. Jonathan’s asleep again. She gets up from the bed and goes to the door, and closes it quietly. Stanley is sitting on Kalie’s bed, still humming softly. He looks up when her shadow comes to the entrance, and seems to question with his eyes.

  “No fever,” Alison murmurs.

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  He puts the back of his hand, quite gently, on the child’s forehead.

  Then looks back at Alison and murmurs, “Cool as a cucumber.”

  She goes into the bathroom and rinses the thermometer, and then stands there, trying not to cry. What a wonderful feeling, having someone in the house again—a kindly someone. She starts back to the entrance of Kalie’s room, but he’s coming out, pulling the door to a crack, moving with the practiced stealth of a father.

  They go back into the living room and are momentarily awkward with each other. She takes up the book of photographs, and they sit side-by-side again. He’s being a good sport with it, paging through.

  There are images of Teddy with Jonathan, and of Alison and Teddy, and of Oliver, too, a family. Alison feels how it might pain Stanley to see her with Teddy, but he gestures to aspects of the photos, hills in distance, colors, shapes, formations of vegetation and stone, shifts of light, pretty sails in a harbor; he points out little details and asks about them, how it was to be in those places, and it occurs to her that, in the early years, she and Teddy did travel quite a bit. There’s a photo of her and Teddy in front of Niagara Falls. She’s got Jonathan in a little carrier on her chest, and Teddy’s got his arm around her, her hand on his chest.

  Behind them, the wrack and mist of the falls stretches far. “That’s not really us in front of the falls,” she tells Stanley in a small, embarrassed voice. “They took the picture in front of a green wall. And then put the falls there.”

  “Mmmm,” he says.

  She turns the page, but he turns it back.

  “I love to look at the falls. I went there once, about five years ago. It’s amazing. You’ve been to the Canadian side.”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too. You know what’s strange about it? Here’s this astonish-ing sight, this completely amazing thing, the falls, those fantastic walls of violent water, and all the way up Clifton Hill there’s all these gimcrack cheap-assed places, carnival barkers and wax museums and arcades. ‘Come see the amazing Guinness Book of World Records museum. Amazing! ’ And the thing is, they all make money, too. I mean what an amazingly funny species we are when you think of a thing like 318

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  that. How could anybody spend five minutes in one of those arcades with that gigantic sight only a few yards away? And they do. By the thousands, they do.”

  She turns the page. Here is Teddy, in the hospital after Jonathan was born, holding the baby. She turns that page. Stanley asks about Teddy.

  What was he like?

  “A little boy.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “Why ‘Oh Lord’?” she says.

  “People say that about me, I’m afraid.”

  “Maybe it’s true of most men.”

  “Well, we have to be boys first, anyway, right? And you have to be girls?”

  “Yes.”

  They smile at each other and then go on turning the pages. They come to the many photos of Alison with her father and the children.

  Now and then, she reaches to point something out. Jonathan in soccer camp, hating it so much that his face took on a perpetual frown, and she had told him it would stick that way, and he went around with a stone-faced mask after that, for days. Stanley swallows the last of his beer and puts the can on the end table.

  “Want another one?” Alison asks him.

  “No,” he says. “Thanks.”

  She moves the book from his lap and sets it on the coffee table. Then she turns to him, looks into his eyes, and waits a few seconds.

  “Alison,” he says.

  And she moves to him, kisses him slow, deep, arms tight around his neck. His arms enfold her, and they go on. It’s a long, lovely, luxuriant kiss. When it ends, he puts his hands on either side of her face. “I was so hoping that would happen.”

  She takes his hands and rises, and leads him into the bedroom. “The children don’t think anything about joining me in the middle of the night.”

  “I’ll go,” he says kindly.

  “I’ll lock the door,” she tells him.

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  “Do you think you should?”

  “Yes.”

  She closes the bedroom door and then pulls her blouse up over her head, removes her bra, and stands there before him. How it charms her that he averts his eyes, looking directly into her own. “I want to take care of you,” he tells her.

  “Oh, yes,” she says.

  Pa r t Th r e e

  =

  N o v e m b e r

  i n c l e m e n c y

  1.

  The week before Thanksgiving begins with snow. A rare storm that deposits almost nine inches on the town, making the angles of rooftops into soft, fat, pillow-like hints of themselves, forming little triangular thick wedges in all the windowpanes and burying the parked cars along the street. Everything seems padded, stuffed with white. School is canceled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, and Elizabeth keeps to her silence, grading papers, tolerating Butterfield’s presence in the house because there’s nowhere for him to go at present. She has made a bed out of the sofa in the living room. The Crazies call several times, and it’s Butterfield who answers. Things are fine, he says to them, because he hopes things will be f
ine and because there could be nothing more disastrous than telling them the truth.

  “Can we at least talk about it?” he says to Elizabeth.

  Nothing. Not even a sign that she has heard him.

  “It was a nervous breakdown,” he says, for perhaps the fifth time.

  “She’s in the mental ward. It’s happened before. Shostakovich has been dealing with it for years.”

  Silence.

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  “Elizabeth, I don’t know what got into me. She came after me. She wouldn’t be denied, Elizabeth.”

  Still nothing. In fact, it’s as if he’s not there at all. So he goes out and clears the sidewalk in front of the house, laboring through the cramps that come, the stinging in his lungs, and the alarming pangs in his chest. He shovels the snow off the porch steps. The next-door house seems empty. The snow has encased its lower quadrants.

  Holly calls Friday morning to say that Oliver Ward will be released from the hospital Wednesday, in time for the holiday, and she’s taken the liberty of inviting him and his daughter and grandchildren to Thanksgiving dinner on Temporary Road. “You don’t mind the extra faces at the table, do you? I’ve asked Brother Fire to join us as well.”

  “Not at all,” Butterfield tells her, minding it very much. He doesn’t even want to go. He says, “Did you know what’s going on with Gail?”

  Silence on the other end.

  “She’s bringing her new lover. Name of Edie.”

  “Is that what you and Elizabeth were so upset about?”

  Because, for now, it’s simpler to lie, he says, “Something like that, yes.”

  “Well, grow up.”

  “It’s the timing,” Butterfield says. “You can see that, can’t you?”

  His mother gives forth a little, knowing laugh. “Examine your own conscience.”

  “I think I’ll barricade myself inside right here.”

  “Think anybody’ll make it now, with all this snow? They’re calling for more of it on Monday.”

  “Oh, they’ll be here.”

  “Well, the whole thing ought to be fun.”

  “A laugh riot,” Butterfield says.

  Later, he walks into the living room, where Elizabeth is sitting on the sofa with a blanket over her knees, grading papers. “I don’t know what to do about the holiday,” he says.

  She turns a page and stares at the words on it.

  “How do we get through the holiday?”

  She marks something on the page.

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  “Sweetie? Please.”

  “Do you want me to tell them?”

  “Can’t we come back from this, Elizabeth?”

  Silence again.

  “Honey?”

  Nothing.

  “Maybe I’ll go, then. Find a place in town.”

  She won’t look up.

  “Will you be able to explain this to everybody?”

  Still, she concentrates on the work before her, or seems to.

  He walks upstairs and into their bedroom, and sits on the bed, hands folded in his lap. The wind hits the house, rams at the windows with a force almost solid. He gets up and looks out at the next-door house.

  Shostakovich is out there, shoveling his walk at last, wearing an open coat and a scarf, looking tired and discouraged.

  The day passes. It grows dark, and the wind blows, and Butterfield sits in the living room and watches television news, where they talk about a warming trend—most of the snow will melt over the next day or two. The false cheer of the weatherman going on about the possibility of a white Christmas annoys him, so, he flicks the channel to another station. This one has its regular Y2K watch, with predictions about what sort of chaos might result from the computer glitch and the turn of the century. The idea of the turn of the century, the end of the millennium, seems too absurd for consideration now. And how strange it is to be here, in this room, under this bleak light, while a blandly handsome face on television goes on about the new century.

  Elizabeth is upstairs somewhere, and then down in the kitchen. She makes a sandwich for herself and goes back upstairs, leaving the bread and lettuce and tomato on the counter. He desires to believe this is a consideration of him, a sign: she supposes he might want to make a sandwich, too. But it’s probably only her low mood, the apathy that has settled over her. He can’t break through the silence.

  Shostakovich comes to the door a little after eight o’clock. He’s bundled up, scarf wrapped across his face. Butterfield asks him in, hoping he’ll refuse. He does come in, but only to stand in the foyer and talk a 326

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  little. Ariana’s still under sedation at the hospital. She’ll be fine, though, once the medications start working. He’s hoping she’ll be able to go to New Haven with him to visit a friend, a former doctor of hers. They’ll be gone through the holidays if she can go.

  “Tough to travel on Thanksgiving,” Butterfield says to him through an urge to gag. “The airports are so inhospitable.”

  “Actually, we’ll drive up.”

  “Oh.”

  “I hope we can go tomorrow.”

  Butterfield nods and waits. The other man seems to be looking too deeply at him.

  “I wonder if you’d keep a sort of watch on the house?”

  He thinks of the fact that he’s probably not going to be here. But he says, “Sure.”

  They shake hands, and Shostakovich walks on through the deep snow of the lawn back to his own house. When Butterfield closes the door and turns, he sees Elizabeth standing at the top of the stairs. A moment passes, in which they simply look at each other. Then she turns and is gone. He hears the bedroom door close quietly.

  He starts up the stairs. “People coming in Wednesday, Elizabeth.

  Family coming in here. I’m not moving out. It’s Thanksgiving, Elizabeth.” He’s outside the bedroom door. He puts his hand flat against it and then raps it once, letting the hand slide down the panel. “Elizabeth? How do you want to play this? People are going to look at us and wonder what the hell, baby. Can we decide something? You want me to leave now?”

  Nothing.

  “Elizabeth?”

  He waits again.

  “Honey?”

  More silence.

  He walks away from the door and down the stairs, into the kitchen, where the food is still out. He puts it all away gingerly, as if trying not to make a sound. Then he moves to the kitchen sink, puts his hands down on it, leans there, head between his shoulders, and begins to cry.

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  He wants to break everything in the room—make a huge crashing of everything. But, for a long time, he can only stand there weeping, and, when it’s over, he lurches toward the sofa, her makeshift bed. He’ll sleep here tonight, in the soft fragrance of her body, her nights here. It’s agreed without having been spoken. He lies down, leaving the light on, and listens to the silence. When he turns and cradles his own head, the noise surprises him. So quiet. Even the wind outside has stopped. The world has stopped. He turns the light out, and stares into the darkness, waiting for sleep that won’t come.

  2.

  Oliver’s dressed and ready to go before the sun comes up. He sits on his bed, with his small bag of personal items: comb, brush, toothbrush and toothpaste, socks and underwear, and the two paperbacks Alison brought him, westerns, though he’s tired of westerns. He’s full of resolve now: he’ll make everything up to Alison and to the children. He’ll be better.

  The doctor has spoken to him about a surgery that will correct the tic in his neck, and he’s deciding against that, because he doesn’t deserve it. But then he’s aware of the essentially self-pitying nature of the thought, and, so, he begins mulling the idea over—how it might be, to have a few years without the continual denunciation of his shaking head. He’s waiting patiently through all this spiraling in his mind. Alison
will come get him, though she isn’t due until eight-thirty. Another two hours. The corrective surgery will mean another hospital stay—a longer one, too, since it will involve the spine. A part of him doesn’t want ever to see the inside of a hospital again.

  Drew is sleeping behind him, for once without any sputtering or reciting. He’s supposed to be released also today, sometime later in the afternoon. How strange it’s been, with this man in the next bed and his quiet wife and his odd litany. Oliver still can’t recall a single repeated name, and not one male name. Several times during the past two days, 328

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  he’s found himself glancing over there, stealing looks at Drew, trying to see him as all the named women evidently have seen him—if they are not indeed figments of his imagination, and the one time Oliver said to him, “I wonder who these women are that you’re naming all the time,”

  Drew looked at him, visibly mystified, and said, “What the hell’re you talking about? I’m a happily married man.” Either way, Oliver is unable to see more than the spindly-legged, squarish-faced, heavy-browed, graying man with the bulbous nose and the cloudy blue eyes. Nobody special. Deep creases on either side of a wide mouth, a turkey-wattle neck bristling with a two-day-old beard. An old man. Ordinary, ordinary. Like Oliver, of course.

  He now looks over at Drew, who snores slightly, stirs, and then is still. Oliver finds himself thinking about the mystery of what draws one person to another. His Mary was a virgin when he met her, and, as far as he knew, she never loved anyone else. She loved Oliver. Oliver, static in a job that barely kept the wolf away from the door, and she used to describe their lives that way when people asked how she was. “Well,”

  she’d say, “we’ve so far kept the wolf away from the door.” Toward the end, there was so much lassitude in her voice, and she had been such a bright, happy, ebullient girl, with a lovely laugh and a sidelong way of looking at you that expressed trust in your good intentions. There are times when he thinks he’ll see her again, imagines her watching over him. But he has seen the terrors of the world, too, and something in his soul bridles at the thought of her disembodied, diaphanous, insubstan-tial, in a spirit world, trailing from cloud to cloud like a thin veil. She was far too practical and earthy for such a conceit, would’ve laughed at him for entertaining it, or—as he has sometimes done—depending on it for solace. He carries her around in his heart, a memory, an instance, the dividing line of his life. Yes. There was a before Mary, there was Mary, and, for a long time now, there has only been afterwards. The long, blur-ring procession of days wishing he could have been stronger, steadier, more dependable. Finally, it seems now to him, sitting here waiting to get out of the hospital, that there are offenses in the world that the world refuses to punish. This depressing thought makes him sigh, and, behind him, Drew says, “What, Mary?”