Charles Baxter - The Soul Thief

When Nathaniel’s mother and stepfather were living in New York City, and he would return home from college during spring break and, later, during the summers, the sunlight had a curiously hard metallic sheen. On good spring days the light defined trees, buildings, and people alike with brilliant tactile clarity. Then, in late summer, like the old-time God of the ancients, enraged, the sun would melt down whatever it saw and start over again. In August, Nathaniel thought, the sopping gruesome heat in Manhattan liquefied the city. Someday the entire urban landscape would ooze into the Hudson. In New York, summer would be the season of doom.

By contrast, his childhood sun over Milwaukee tended to be Midwestern and diffident, hidden by clouds tossed up by moisture from the Great Lakes. For most of his youth, he had lived under vague, noncommittal skies, broken occasionally by raging storms. Then the clouds would part to reveal the banal blue immensity.

His parents had resided in a three-bedroom suburban house with a white picket fence and a large grassy backyard with a rose garden, an arbor, and a reflecting ball, and to this day Nathaniel believes that if his father hadn’t died of a sudden stroke in his forties, and if his sister hadn’t been in the automobile accident that took her speech away, he would still be living out there in the suburbs, selling insurance or working as an accountant, starting a family and following some harmless occupation under those noncommittal Mid-western skies. He’d have a white picket fence and a rose garden of his own and a very white wife; he’d have an indistinct human outline and would genially fade into his home and family and belongings.

He cleans and cuts up the carrots and sets to work on the potatoes. The beef and celery can wait. The Vaughan Williams symphony progresses into its third movement, a meditative adagio.

During his lifetime, Nathaniel’s father had run an elaborate charade: he gave the appearance of being just a standard-issue dad — a person you didn’t have to pay much attention to. An astoundingly unremarkable man, display-case ordinary, an estate-planning attorney who worked at a law firm in downtown Milwaukee, he played catch with his son on weekends or did household repairs while he hummed the same tunes over and over again, “Blue Moon” or “Where or When.” Clumsy and not a true handyman, he was nevertheless willing to repair anything if asked, carrying up his toolbox from the basement and laughing, “Look out, house! I’m coming!” He told jokes around the dinner table. In the morning he would playfully bonk his sleepy son on the head with the rolled-up newspaper to wake him. He would go fishing with his friends on Lake Winnitonka. As an alumnus of the University of Michigan, he watched Wolverine football on Saturdays if he had the time. He made of himself a generic parent, sweet and well-meaning and doubtlessly in a consensual relationship with routine. If he harbored quiet desperation, he kept it to himself.

After his death, he acquired perfection. Perfection dropped like an alarming protective covering over his memory, as Nathaniel and Catherine, his son and daughter, helplessly recognized — they saw it happen. No one could remember their father’s flaws. Once he was gone, his benign imperturbable self became painfully lovable and thus toxic. His monkey way of scratching his back, his unpleasant habit of picking his teeth after dinner, his insistence on pouring too much garlic salt over the steaks before he grilled them, that strange equanimity of his — he never seemed to get angry, irritability being all he could manage — all of it coalesced into the composite of an affable man who, in everyone’s collective memory, gave nobody the advantage of having a case against him. He had been sweet and generous. Who had noticed? Nobody. His virtues came back, as virtues will, to haunt the living.

He had taken his children for walks on trails through the city parks and into the playgrounds, where he had pushed them on the swings. He had carried first Catherine and then Nathaniel, as kids, on his shoulders; they had grabbed on to his hair to stabilize themselves and to steer him. He remembered birthdays, took the family on excursions to movies, and always showed up for school functions. He was a patiently good man who seemed to relish his nonentity status, his lack of individuality. Nathaniel on the basketball team, Catherine in gymnastics: he was there to witness them both. His habit of saying, “You’ve enlightened me.” The beer after dinner, the affectionate kisses on the top of the head, his patience in teaching his kids how to swim or to ride a bicycle or to approach the net, his interest in history and Russian nineteenth-century fiction, his demand on New Year’s Eve that his wife sit in his lap — oh, it was unforgivable, all of it, the entire inventory, it was a fortress that could never be breached once he was gone.

After her father’s death, Catherine, silent and spectral, would sleepwalk into Nathaniel’s bedroom. She would clear away his discarded clothes on the floor. Then she would descend, convulsed with sobs, and curl up like a dog. Already half a ghost herself, she brought herself to her brother’s room so that he might witness her grief. If there had been consolation to be offered, Nathaniel had no idea where to find it. Their father, a genial guy they had taken for granted, was now fully absent and had taken all comfort with him. What was there to say? Nothing much. Nathaniel resorted to patting his sister on the back as she lay there on the floor beside his bed.

She had been a strong solid smart girl, with brilliant blue eyes that had ice traces in them. As a field hockey player and a rock singer fronting a high school band called Strep Throat, she had been good at raising her voice. With her particular appetites and raucousness, she would have been loved early on in the ordinary course of things by some brave boy who might have noticed and admired her. She was an inventory-taker, a psychic accountant, habitually noting quantities and qualities in rooms and in people. But after her father’s death, a single inventory took over the others. “There was only one of him,” she would sigh, over and over again.

She formed a new appetite for oblivion.

Nathaniel had not guessed that his sister could be furtive, brazenness having been her usual tactic, but, freed from stability, she developed a gift for secrecy. She joyfully took up drinking, a habit for which she had a calling. Alcoholism brought out her stealthy side, the midnight joy of beer from the refrigerator and whiskey from the cupboard. Nothingness called to her and she answered. At first she drank alone or with strangers. Her mother concealed all the liquor bottles — a guileless woman, she first tried hiding them behind the detergent boxes in the laundry room, where they were as obvious as Easter eggs — before throwing all of them out.

Catherine quickly found a community of like-minded high school classmates who drank, a whole crowd of fellow students who loved getting wasted as much as she herself did. They drank and drove and staggered around the woodsy Wisconsin off-road locales they found, cursing the sky, vomiting, laughing, falling down, passing out, waking up, and crawling behind the wheel before starting up the collaborating cars and weaving their way back.

On a Friday night in early November in Catherine’s senior year, one of these boys, on a mission to take Catherine home, drove off the road into a patiently waiting tree. The impact threw her forward into the dashboard. When she came to, wrapped in swaddling clothes after several days of unconsciousness, all her words had been wiped clean from her brain’s left hemisphere. She had sustained a skull fracture, a broken arm, and her body seemed to be one large bruise. The driver, a boy contemptuous of the future, had successfully canceled his own, but she had been saved — that is, her physical life had been saved — and before very long she was up and about, seemingly as beautiful as ever, except for her eyes, which had gone blank. The neurologists claimed that something had happened in her posterior temporal lobe, and they engaged in professional mumbling about the prognosis, saying that there would certainly be more tests until that stage when they could discover the source of her asymptomatic verbal aphasia. The tests, they said to Nathaniel and his mother, were very good these days. We have excellent tests, they said proudly, brain injury is no longer the grave mystery it once was, we will figure it out. And we have therapies, many of which have been proven to work. We are scientists; this is a science.