Saint Maybe

by Anne Tyler

  “But honey is a stimulant, too,” Thomas told her.

  Ian said, “Thomas. Hey, sport. Maybe if we just—”

  “Do you hear that?” Grandma asked Ian. “Do you hear how he’s been brainwashed?”

  “Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

  “It’s not enough that you should fall for it yourself! That you’d obey their half-wit rules and support their maniac minister and scandalize the whole neighborhood by trying to convert the Cahns.”

  “I wasn’t trying to convert them! I was having a theoretical discussion.”

  “A theoretical discussion, with people who’ve been Jewish longer than this country’s been a nation! Oh, I will never understand. Why, Ian? Why have you turned out this way? Why do you keep doing penance for something that never happened? I know it never happened; I promise it never happened. Why do you persist in believing all that foolishness?”

  “Bee, dear heart,” Grandpa said.

  Now Thomas noticed how still the room had grown. Maybe Grandma noticed too, because she stopped talking and two pink spots started blooming in her cheeks.

  “Bee,” Grandpa said, “we’ve got a crew of hungry kids here wondering if you plan on coming their way.”

  The others made murmury laughing sounds, although Thomas didn’t see anything so funny. Then Grandma quirked the corners of her mouth and raised her chin. “Why! I certainly doo-oo!” she said musically, and off she sailed with her cake.

  The frosting was caramel. Thomas had checked earlier. His grandma made the best caramel frosting in Baltimore—rich and deep and golden, as smooth as butter when it slid across your tongue.

  Daphne went off at nine, kicking up a fuss in Ian’s arms because the cousins were still there, but Thomas and Agatha got to stay awake till the last of the guests had said good night—almost ten-thirty, which was way past their normal bedtime.

  “Don’t forget your baths!” Ian called after them as they climbed the stairs, but Thomas was too sleepy for a bath and he fell into bed in his underwear, leaving his clothes in a heap on the floor. He shut his eyes and saw turquoise blue, the color of Sister Myra’s swimming pool. He heard the clatter of china downstairs, and the rattle of silver, and the slow, dancy radio songs his grandma liked to listen to while she did the dishes. (She would be washing and Ian would be clearing away and drying; she always said the hot water felt so good on her finger joints.) “Where do you want these place mats?” Ian called. Loud announcers’ voices interrupted each other in the living room; Grandpa was hunting baseball scores on TV. “… never saw Jessie Jordan so gossipy,” Grandma said, and someone shouted, “BEEN IN A BATTING SLUMP SINCE MID-JUNE—”

  “Could you turn that down?” Grandma called.

  Then Thomas must have slept, because the next thing he knew the house was silent and he had a feeling the silence had been going on a long time. There wasn’t even a cricket chirping. There wasn’t even a faraway truck or a train whistle. The only sounds were those scraps of past voices that float across your mind sometimes when there’s nothing else to listen to. “Thank you, Sister Audrey,” Reverend Emmett said, and Grandma said, “Why, Ian? Why?”

  Thomas should have told her why. He knew the answer, after all. Or, at least, he thought he did. The answer is, you get to meet in heaven. They’ll be waiting for you there if you’ve been careful to do things right. His mother would be waiting in her frilly pink dress. She would drive her station wagon to the gate and she’d sit there with the motor idling, her elbow resting on the window ledge, and when she caught sight of him her face would light up all happy and she would wave. “Thomas! Over here!” she would call, and if he didn’t spot her right away she would honk, and then he would catch sight of her and start running in her direction.

  5

  People Who Don’t Know the Answers

  After Doug Bedloe retired, he had a little trouble thinking up things to do with himself. This took him by surprise, because he was accustomed to the schoolteacher’s lengthy summer vacations and he’d never found it hard to fill them. But retirement, it seemed, was another matter. There wasn’t any end to it. Also it was given more significance. Loaf around in summer, Bee would say he deserved his rest. Loaf in winter, she read it as pure laziness. “Don’t you have someplace to go?” she asked him. “Lots of men join clubs or something. Couldn’t you do Meals on Wheels? Volunteer at the hospital?”

  Well, he tried. He approached a group at his church that worked with disadvantaged youths. Told them he had forty years’ experience coaching baseball. They were delighted. First he was supposed to get some training, though—spend three Saturdays learning about the emotional ups and downs of adolescents. The second Saturday, it occurred to him he was tired of adolescents. He’d been dealing with their ups and downs for forty years now, and the fact was, they were shallow.

  So then he enrolled in this night course in the modern short story (his daughter’s idea). Figured that would not be shallow, and short stories were perfect since he never had been what you would call a speed reader. It turned out, though, he didn’t have a knack for discussing things. You read a story; it’s good or it’s bad. What’s to discuss? The other people in the class, they could ramble on forever. Halfway through the course, he just stopped attending.

  He retreated to the basement, then. He built a toy chest for his youngest grandchild—a pretty decent effort, although Ian (Mr. Artsy-Craftsy) objected to particleboard. Also, carpentry didn’t give him quite enough to think about. Left a kind of empty space in his mind that all sorts of bothersome notions could rush in and fill.

  Once in a while something needed fixing; that was always welcome. Bee would bring him some household object and he would click his tongue happily and ask her, “What did you do to this?”

  “I just broke it, Doug, all right?” she would say. “I deliberately went and broke it. I sat up late last night plotting how to break it.”

  And he would shake his head, feeling gratified and important.

  Such occasions didn’t arise every day, though, or even every week. Not nearly enough to keep him fully occupied.

  It had been assumed all along that he would help out more with the grandkids, once he’d retired. Lord knows help was needed. Daphne was in first grade now but still a holy terror. Even the older two—ten and thirteen—took quite a lot of seeing to. And Bee’s arthritis had all but crippled her and Ian was running himself ragged. They talked about getting a woman in a couple of days a week, but what with the cost of things … well, money was a bit tight for that. So Doug tried to lend a hand, but he turned out to be kind of a dunderhead. For instance, he saw the kids had tracked mud across the kitchen floor and so he fetched the mop and bucket with the very best of intentions, but next thing he knew Bee was saying, “Doug, I swan, not to sweep first and swabbing all that dirty water around …” and Ian said, “Here, Dad, I’ll take over.” Doug yielded the mop, feeling both miffed and relieved, and put on his jacket and whistled up the dog for a walk.

  He and Beastie took long, long walks these days. Not long in distance but in time; Beastie was so old now she could barely creep. Probably she’d have preferred to stay home, but Doug would have felt foolish strolling the streets with no purpose. This gave him something to hang onto—her ancient, cracked leather leash, which sagged between them as she inched down the sidewalk. He could remember when she was a puppy and the leash grew taut as a clothesline every time a squirrel passed.

  For no good reason, he pictured what it would look like if Bee were the one walking Beastie. The two of them hunched and arthritic, a matched set. It hurt to think of it. He had often seen such couples—aged widows and their decrepit pets. If he died, Bee would have to walk Beastie, at least in the daytime when the kids weren’t home. But of course, he was not about to die. He had always kept in shape. His hair might be gray now but it was still there, and he could fit into trousers he’d bought thirty years ago.

  A while back, though, their family doctor had told him something uns
ettling. He’d said, “Know what I hate? When a patient comes in and says, ‘Doc, I’m here for a checkup. Next month I hit retirement age and I’ve planned all these great adventures.’ Then sure as shooting, I’ll find he’s got something terminal. It never fails.”

  Well, Doug had avoided that eventuality. He just hadn’t gone for a checkup.

  And anyhow, planned no great adventures.

  The trouble was, he was short on friends. Why had he never noticed before? It seemed he’d had so many back in high school and college.

  If Danny had lived, maybe he would have been a friend.

  Although Ian was nice company too, of course.

  It was just that Ian seemed less … oh, less related to him, somehow. Maybe on account of that born-again business. He was so serious and he never just goofed off the way Danny used to do or sat around shooting the breeze with his dad. Didn’t even have a girlfriend anymore; that pretty little Cicely had faded Clear out of the picture. She had found someone else, Doug supposed. Not that Ian had ever said so. That was the thing: they didn’t talk.

  Danny used to talk.

  Walking Beastie past the foreigners’ house one unseasonably mild day in February, Doug noticed someone lying face down on the roof. Good Lord, what now? They lived the strangest lives over there. This fellow was sprawled parallel to the eaves, poking some wire or electrical cord through an upstairs window. Doug paused to watch. Beastie groaned and thudded to the ground. “Need help?” Doug called.

  The foreigner raised his head. In that peremptory way that foreigners sometimes have, he said, “Yes, please to enter the house and accept this wire.”

  “Oh. Okay,” Doug said.

  He let Beastie’s leash drop. She wasn’t going anywhere.

  He had been in the foreigners’ house several times, because they gave a neighborhood party every Fourth of July. (“Happy your Independence Day,” one of them had once said. “Happy yours,” he’d answered before he thought.) He knew that the window in question belonged to the second-floor bathroom, and so he crossed the hall, which was totally bare of furniture, and climbed the stairs and entered the bathroom. The foreigner’s face hung upside down outside the window, his thick black hair standing straight off his head so that he looked astonished. “Here!” he called.

  Darned if he hadn’t broken a corner out of a pane. Not a neatly drilled hole in the wood but a jagged triangle in the glass itself. A wire poked through—antenna wire, it looked like. Doug pulled on it carefully so as not to abrade it. He reeled it in foot by foot. “Okay,” the foreigner said, and his face disappeared.

  Doug hadn’t thought to wonder how the man had got up on the roof in the first place. All at once he was down again, brushing off his clothes in the bathroom doorway—a good-looking, stocky young fellow in a white shirt and blue jeans. You could always tell foreigners by the way they wore their jeans, so neat and proper with the waist at the actual waistline, and in this man’s case even a crease ironed in. Jim, was that his name? No, Jim was from an earlier batch. (The foreigners came and went in rotation, with their M.D.’s or their Ph.D.’s or their engineering degrees.) “Frank?” Doug tried.

  “Fred.”

  They were always so considerate about dropping whatever unpronounceable names they’d been christened with. Or not christened, maybe, but—

  “Please to tie the wire about the radiator’s paw,” Fred told him.

  “What is it, anyhow?”

  “It is aerial for my shortwave radio.”

  “Ah.”

  “I attached it to TV antenna on chimney.”

  “Is that safe?” Doug asked him.

  “Maybe; maybe not,” Fred said cheerfully.

  Doug wouldn’t have worried, except these people seemed prone to disasters. Last summer, while hooking up an intercom, they had set their attic on fire. Doug wasn’t sure how an intercom could start a fire exactly. All he knew was, smoke had begun billowing from the little eyebrow window on the roof and then six or seven foreigners had sauntered out of the house and stood in the yard gazing upward, looking interested. Finally Mrs. Jordan had called the fire department. What on earth use would they have for an intercom anyway? she had asked Bee later. But that was how they were, the foreigners: they just loved gadgets.

  Fred was walking backward now, playing out the wire as he headed across the hall. From the looks of things, he planned to let it lie in the middle of the floor where it would ambush every passerby. “You got any staples?” Doug asked, following.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Staples? U-shaped nails? Electrical staples, insulated,” Doug went on, without a hope in this world. “You tack the wire to the baseboard so it doesn’t trip folks up.”

  “Maybe later,” Fred said vaguely.

  Meanwhile leading the wire directly across the hall and allowing not one inch of slack.

  In Fred’s bedroom, gold brocade draped an army cot. A bookcase displayed folded T-shirts, boxer shorts, and rolled socks stacked in a pyramid like cannonballs. Doug managed to take all this in because there was nothing else to look at—not a desk or chair or bureau, not a mirror or family photo. A brown plastic radio sat on the windowsill, and Fred inserted the wire into a hole in its side.

  “Looks to me like you might’ve brought the wire in this window,” Doug told him.

  But Fred shrugged and said, “More far to fall.”

  “Oh,” Doug said.

  Presumably, Fred was not one of the engineering students.

  Fred turned on the radio and music started playing, some Middle Eastern tune without an end or a beginning. He half closed his eyes and nodded his head to the beat.

  “Well, I’d better be going,” Doug said.

  “You know what means these words?” Fred asked. “A young man is telling farewell to his sweetheart, he is saying to her now—”

  “Gosh, Beastie must be wondering where I’ve got to,” Doug said. “I’ll just see myself out, never mind.”

  He had thought it would be a relief to escape the music, but after he left—after he returned home, even, and unsnapped Beastie’s leash—the tune continued to wind through his head, blurred and wandery and mysteriously exciting.

  A couple of days later, the foreigners tried wiring the radio to speakers set strategically around the house. The reason Doug found out about it was, Fred came over to ask what those U-shaped nails were called again. “Staples,” Doug told him, standing at the door in his slippers.

  “No, no. Staples are for paper,” Fred said firmly.

  “But the nails are called staples too. See, what you want is …” Doug said, and then he said, “Wait here. I think I may have some down in the basement.”

  So one thing led to another. He found the staples, he went over to help, he stayed for a beer afterward, and before long he was more or less hanging out there. They always had some harebrained project going, something he could assist with or (more often) advise them not to attempt; and because they were students, keeping students’ irregular hours, he could generally count on finding at least a couple of them at home. Five were currently living there: Fred, Ray, John, John Two, and Ollie. On weekends more arrived—fellow countrymen studying elsewhere—and some of the original five disappeared. Doug left them alone on weekends. He preferred late weekday afternoons, when the smells of spice and burnt onions had already started rising from Ollie’s blackened saucepans in the kitchen and the others lolled in the living room with their beers. The living room was furnished with two webbed aluminum beach lounges, a wrought-iron lawn chair, and a box spring propped on four stacks of faded textbooks. Over the fireplace hung a wrinkled paper poster of a belly dancer drinking a Pepsi. A collapsible metal TV tray held the telephone, and the wall above it was scribbled all over with names and numbers and Middle Eastern curlicues. Doug liked that idea—that a wall could serve as a phone directory. It struck him as very practical. He would squint at the writing until it turned lacy and decorative, and then he’d take another sip of beer.

/>   These people weren’t much in the way of drinkers. They appeared to view alcohol as yet another inscrutable American convention, and they would dangle their own beers politely, forgetting them for long minutes; so Doug never had more than one. Then he’d say, “Well, back to the fray,” and they would rise to see him off, thanking him once again for whatever he’d done.

  At home, by comparison, everything seemed so permanent—the rooms layered over with rugs and upholstered furniture and framed pictures. The grandchildren added layers of their own; the hall was awash in cast-off jackets and schoolbooks. Bee would be in the kitchen starting supper. (How unadorned the Bedloes’ suppers smelled! Plain meat, boiled vegetables, baked potatoes.) And if Ian was back from work he’d be occupied with the kids—sorting out whose night it was to set the table, arbitrating their disputes or even taking part in them as if he were a kid himself. Listen to him with Daphne, for instance. She was nagging him to find her green sweater; tomorrow was St. Patrick’s Day. “Your green sweater’s in the wash,” he said, and that should have been the end of it—would have been, if Bee had been in charge. But Daphne pressed on, wheedling. “Please? Please, Ian? They’ll make fun of me if I don’t wear something green.”

  “Tell them your eyes are the something green.”

  “My what? My eyes? But they’re blue.”

  “Well, if anybody points that out, put on this injured look and say, ‘Oh. I’ve always liked to think of them as green.’ ”

  “Oh, Ian,” Daphne said. “You’re such a silly.”

  He was, Doug reflected. And a sucker besides. For sure enough, later that night he heard the washing machine start churning.

  Most days Ian took the car, but Tuesdays he caught the bus to work so Doug could drive Bee to the doctor. She had to go every single week. Doug knew that doctor’s waiting room so well by now that he could see it in his dreams. A leggy, wan philodendron plant hung over the vinyl couch. A table was piled with magazines you would have to be desperate to read—densely printed journals devoted to infinitesimal research findings.