Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  A plate with orange slices is on the end table at Gail’s side, and she has a magazine open on the arm of the chair. “Happy Thanksgiving,”

  she says without quite looking up. “Edie’s still asleep.”

  Butterfield goes to the front door and retrieves the morning paper, then comes back to the sofa and sits down with it.

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  “What do you think,” Gail says.

  He only glances at her. Then turns to the paper, holding it open over his legs crossed at the knee. “Concerning what?”

  “Come on, Dad.”

  And now he does look at her. “Nice person,” he says.

  “That’s all?”

  “What’d you expect exactly, Gail? She seems like a nice person.

  Damn.”

  “Elizabeth welcomed her to the family.”

  He looks at the paper again, snaps it straight to emphasize the gesture.

  “I’m happy for the first time in my life,” Gail says. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all?”

  “I’m glad you’re happy. I don’t know how else to express it, though.

  What is it that you find about me that’s deficient?”

  “Nothing, forget it.”

  “I said she’s a nice person. I heard myself. And you did, too. Don’t deny it.”

  “I’m so out of here.” She gets up and makes a production of removing her magazine and her coffee and the plate of orange slices.

  A little while later, Mark comes down from his room. “Did you sleep down here?” he asks Butterfield.

  “Yeah,” Butterfield says out of the side of his mouth. “Right.”

  “You going to the bookstore at all this weekend?”

  “Why?”

  “Like to see it,” Mark says. “Been a while.” He goes on into the kitchen. There he and Gail engage in a sort of muttering banter, not particularly friendly, more the back-and-forth of siblings, with their little ways of annoying one another and their ruthlessness in using every nuance. At one point, they both laugh, and Butterfield hears Gail say, again, sardonically, “Happy Thanksgiving.”

  Edie comes down wearing a pair of black slacks and a white blouse, with a red scarf at the collar, like a cravat. She has put makeup on—a little something to darken her lips, and eye shadow as well. She seems a bit sheepish, eyes down, murmuring “Good morning” to Butterfield.

  “How’d you sleep?” he asks her.

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  “Oh, ve-ry go-ud.” That accent.

  When Elizabeth comes down, preparations begin for carting dishes over to the house on Temporary Road. Everyone’s friendly. Elizabeth even laughs at something Mark says about the fishy smell of a Thanksgiving morning. She keeps her gaze from Butterfield, and the busyness of the preparations makes it not particularly noticeable, though Butterfield thinks he sees Edie notice it—thinks, in fact, that Edie is in on things now. Gail, too, perhaps, and Mark. In the next moments, he catches Edie watching him and watching Elizabeth, too. What is it, he thinks, about strangers that makes them able to detect these subtle turnings away, when the ones who ought to notice do not?

  He helps load the trunk of the car with dishes, and, at Elizabeth’s request, goes back inside to make sure that the oven is off, the iron unplugged. Gail, Mark, and Edie leave in Gail’s car to go pay a brief visit to one of Gail’s old school friends; it’s important to her—she takes the trouble to say to her father—that people from her childhood learn of the new situation regarding her sexual orientation. Butterfield walks out to his own car, where his estranged wife sits, arms folded, staring straight ahead. He gets in and starts it, then guns the motor and waits, watching the other car pull away. “I can’t believe this,” he says softly, not expecting an answer.

  No answer comes.

  They ride in silence over to the house on Temporary Road. As they arrive, they see that Brother Fire has just pulled up. He’s getting gingerly out of his car, and he waves at them. Holly’s standing out on the stoop in a bright blue housedress and green slippers. The street’s en-shrouded in mist, and the snow is melting fast, water running in dirty rivulets in the gutter, and there’s an echo of it in the storm drains on the corner, the only sound, like the running of a river. The mist is now a kind of fixed element, water suspended on the air, neither falling nor rising. Butterfield looks at where he knows the roof to be. If Holly were sitting there now, she would not be visible.

  “Welcome,” she says, nodding at the priest and then looking past him at Elizabeth.

  Butterfield begins to empty the trunk, and the priest good-naturedly helps, talking about all the nice smells and the London-like weather. Has 384

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  Butterfield, by any chance, read Dickens’s Bleak House? The description of the fog in London in the first pages of that book portrays this very day.

  Butterfield agrees, recalling the passage and feeling a sense of unlooked-for kinship with the priest. It’s only in this moment that he realizes how much he has been envisioning, dreading him, as an adver-sary presence today. He takes Brother Fire’s arm above the elbow and squeezes. “That’s one of my favorite passages in all of literature,” he says.

  “Oh, mine, too,” says Brother Fire.

  They go into the house, which has an incomplete look and, even so, is festive, with its drawings on the sheets of brown packaging paper hanging from the framed-in wall, where the house will be divided.

  Fiona comes in from the kitchen, wearing a flowered apron over a white blouse and jeans. Her hair is pulled up in a tight bun on top of her head, which makes her seem a good deal taller than she is. She and Holly take the food from Butterfield and the priest, and then Fiona comes bustling back in, wiping her hands on the apron. She kisses Elizabeth and her husband and shakes hands with the priest, who seems more ill-at-ease every second. He moves to the paper wall and begins studying the drawings, like someone in a gallery. The room is festooned with Christmas decorations—strands of glittering white lights, and tinsel on the potted plant by the door, and candles on the tables, ringed with sprigs of holly and pine. Holly has already received several Christmas cards from far-flung friends, and these are taped to the frame of the entrance to the kitchen. The long table is already set: two bottles of white wine in an ice bucket, two of red in a small, wire basket. Platters of bread and cheese and fruit, water glasses, and a large pitcher of water at either end. Little flower arrangements have been set at each place, and there are names written on folded, gilt-edged place cards. Butterfield walks around the table, looking at the names. He moves slowly, for the aches and sore spots in his back. He looks at his wife, who is preoccupied with setting out the food she has brought for the meal—the casserole and deviled eggs, the cranberry salad. He and Elizabeth are to be seated next to each other at one end of the table. At the other end, next to Brother Fire, is Edie Proileux. Edie and Gail will be seated across from each other. Butterfield thinks of what his children do not yet know.

  “You okay?” his mother asks him from the other side of the table.

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  9.

  Elizabeth hears the question, even while Fiona rattles on about how the turkey and the ham will have to take turns in the oven, as they already have for most of the day, and how worried she is about spoiling the meat. Now there’s the necessity of putting the salmon out, Fiona says, but she doesn’t know who’ll eat it. And Elizabeth hears Will say, “I’m wondering what the hell she’s thinking, Mother.”

  This stops everyone for a second. But Holly seems unaffected. She smiles, glancing at the others, and then reaches over and touches his chin. Quite cheerfully, she says, “Well, you know, I think that’s a question for Gail. But I wonder how you’d be if this were her new husband.”

  She turns to the priest and asks him if he would like a little tea or coffee. “Or is it too early for wine?”

&nbs
p; “I’d like wine,” says Will, just as the priest says, “Perhaps one small glass, yes.”

  Holly stops her son from picking up the glass at his place setting.

  “Let’s save those for the dinner, sweetie. Let me get you and Brother Fire some other glasses.” Then she reaches over and puts her fingers, extended as though to catch rain, under his chin. “Lift here,” she says brightly.

  The old priest says, “I always think of the wedding feast at Cana whenever I have a glass of good red wine. It’s one of my favorite passages. The second chapter of John.”

  “All we have is good wine,” Holly says, heading into the kitchen.

  Elizabeth follows, not wanting to be alone with the others. The kitchen smells wonderfully of the cooking meats and the pies that are lying out on the table. There are biscuits in the oven, and two more casseroles sit steaming on the counter.

  “Typical,” Holly says. “We’ve got six things ready and three things not ready and it’s all got to go on at the same time. And people are late.”

  “Can I help?” Elizabeth offers.

  “Listen,” Holly says abruptly. “You can tell me. Is something else go-386

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  ing on? I mean I know Gail’s thing—but I get the feeling something else is bothering you.”

  “Why do you say that?” Elizabeth asks, trying to keep the evenness in her own voice. “I like Edie, to tell you the truth. I have no problem with her at all.”

  “So you’re not reacting to this. What are you reacting to?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Elizabeth says.

  Holly frowns, then sighs, and then gives a faint shrug. “Well, I’m not going to pry.” She retrieves the glasses and moves past Elizabeth to enter the living room, where she picks up one of the bottles of red wine and pours two glasses.

  “I’m assuming you both want red,” she says to her son and to the priest.

  From where Elizabeth stands at the entrance to the kitchen, she sees that Oliver Ward and his daughter and her children are arriving, with some man she hasn’t met. Holly and Fiona are like a force of nature, she decides; they go ahead with things, they go on. Nothing stops them.

  She hears Fiona introduce the man as Stanley. Stanley’s carrying a large platter covered with aluminum foil. “Blue cheese chips,” he says, holding them forward like an offering. Fiona takes the platter and sets it on the table.

  “Look at this,” Alison says to her father, indicating the drawings.

  “Kalie and Jonathan did these. Aren’t they wonderful?”

  Oliver Ward appreciates the drawings, with little whistling sounds and with questions to Kalie, “Did you do this one? And this one?” His head keeps its rhythmical, nerve-firing denial through it all. Elizabeth thinks to compliment him on his grandson, who is such a good student in her class. She starts toward him, but then thinks better of it. Jonathan’s studiously avoiding eye contact with her, and now Oliver’s talking to Butterfield about the drawings and about how this is his favorite holiday. The old priest chimes in that he has always felt exactly that way about it, too. Fiona says she has always liked Christmas better, and she’d bet that one of the charming things about Thanksgiving is really the fact that it represents the first flush of the Christmas season. “Ask yourself if you’re not partly in love with the day because it means Christmas is only a month away.”

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  “No,” Brother Fire says, sipping the wine. “Actually, I always liked the thankfulness aspect of it.”

  “Well, you’re thankful for Christmas.”

  “Oh, yes—well, that, too, of course.”

  “Which is more important, Father? Christmas or Easter?”

  “Well,” says the priest, “if you don’t get Christmas, the birth—you know.”

  “My favorite holiday is the Fourth of July,” Holly says. “I love the fireworks.”

  “I remember,” says Will. Then, to the priest: “She used to get the real ones, rockets.” He glances at Elizabeth, and it’s as if he had momentarily forgotten himself and now has to realize everything all over again: Elizabeth and he are estranged, and she’s in the process of leaving him. It all comes back to his features, the lightheartedness disappearing.

  Oddly now, she finds herself feeling sorry for him. For the first time in all this, she recognizes him, sees him as the man she has loved all these years. The fact sends something like a fright through her, a dread. She remembers Edie’s comment about men being susceptible and rejects it with a shudder. It’s no excuse; there is no excuse, she tells herself. The hours of this weekend go through her like a gale, the force of this occasion itself propelling everyone through the day—it’s as though it all might weaken her determination. And then this worry turns into something else: a sense of it all as a threat to her pride. Once more, she can’t think beyond the idea itself. She has to leave him. The future is a blank; tomorrow morning, the day after, all blank. She watches Oliver Ward moving slowly along the brown paper wall of drawings, his head shaking. No, no, no, no, he seems to be saying, with that tic of his. Alison stands with him; Jonathan and the girl wait with Stanley on the other side of the room. Those people love each other, Elizabeth thinks. There is love.

  I’m looking at it.

  But then she watches Fiona and Holly working together to put the final touches on the dinner. She has never felt lonelier or more uncertain of herself.

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  10.

  Brother Fire, feeling the mortal tensions in the room, steps outside on the porch. He is joined by Will Butterfield, who brings a pack of cigarettes out of his pants pocket and offers him one. The priest says, “Oh, no thank you.” But then changes his mind, watching the other light up.

  “Well, you know that does smell good.”

  “Here, Father,” Butterfield says.

  They stand there, smoking. There’s very little breeze now. The day couldn’t be more dank, or colorless-seeming, though there are visible pockets of brown grass where the snow has melted, and some tints still show in the mist-shrouded trees that line the road. The mist moves, and the leaves seem washed out, drained of any vividness, like a memory of a street in the fall. Brother Fire thinks of Mr. Petit, staring out a hospital window at the grayness all around. It occurs to him to say that sometimes the soul can mist over like that, and one can so easily lose one’s way. But he doesn’t wish to spend the afternoon thinking about a homily.

  Butterfield draws on his cigarette and gazes, tight-jawed, out at the street. Then he lets the smoke go and says, “Bad weather.”

  “It has its own sort of beauty, though, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose.”

  The priest watches him blow out the smoke. He seems about to say something else. But then he holds back, flicking ashes off the end of the cigarette.

  “Getting colder,” Brother Fire remarks.

  “Feels like it,” Butterfield says.

  Brother Fire takes a drag of his own cigarette, and, having felt the enormous delicateness of the surface of this day, finds that he isn’t slightly curious about the reasons for it. This, he realizes with a start, is significant. Yet he wishes also to help if he can—after all, it is usually a matter not much more complicated than a kind word or gesture at the right time.

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  He’s suddenly visited by a sense of exhilaration so profound that it momentarily stops his breath.

  It’s as if the answer, the whole answer itself—to the puzzle of being, to the vast mystery bodied forth in the Fall and Creation and the immeasurable sorrows and horrors, the redemptive blood of Christ and every single human frailty no matter how trivial, and every triumph, too—were about to be laid open for him, standing here on this little porch in a little valley town in Virginia. He feels his own calling again, more strongly than he did when he was a young man, and he reaches ov
er and pats Will Butterfield on the shoulder. “Things will be all right, son.”

  “I was more or less talking about the weather inside, Father.”

  Brother Fire pats his shoulder again. They stand there, smoking the cigarettes.

  “You know how it is, Father, when the road looks clear and perfectly safe and dry and it’s actually covered with black ice?”

  No answer seems required, so he simply waits.

  Butterfield flicks his cigarette out on the snow-patched lawn and says, “That’s the situation we’ve got right here, right now.”

  Brother Fire experiences a knot of apprehension in the nerves around his stomach. He felt so wonderful only a moment ago, and he’s aware of the threat and temptation of that kind of spiritual excitement, the fact that one can become attached to that for itself. Even so, he wishes not to have it dissipated in this fashion, with a sour confession of some emotional inclemency. “I’m sure it can be helped with prayer,” he says with forced brightness, flicking his own cigarette.

  “Will you say the Thanksgiving prayer, do you think?”

  “Well—”

  “Because I’d like you to talk about forgiveness.”

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  11.

  Mark and Gail pull in with Edie a minute or so later. Elizabeth sees them from the living-room window, where she sits sipping ice water and talking with Alison about the trouble at the school—the trouble generally at all the schools. They come to the door, and Holly lets them in. There are polite introductions of Alison, and Stanley, and Oliver, the children, the priest, Fiona.