Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Clouds, mud, wind. Joy and woe, mad happiness and rue lived side by side in Saul with very few emotions in between. Even his gloom was thick with lyric intensity, like a brass band playing a funeral march all day and having a good time doing it. No longer a figure in a Russian novel, he imagined all winter that he lived stranded in an ink drawing by a Chinese artist who lived in the Midwest. He himself was the suggested figure in the lower-right-hand corner. Colors — the bright happy colors— were for elsewhere, for those suspicious characters who comported themselves in California or Florida, who couldn’t face up to cloudy days, who required sports cars and perpetual sunlight and suntans to get through the day.

Wearing his Northwestern University gym clothes, he liked to jog after work alongside the drainage ditch, where he could watch a microwave transmission tower being constructed two miles away. He heard noises of construction, the distant sounds of heavy machinery. From a spidery oak tree, a crow cawed, announcing rain. Near the highway on a Sunday morning two weeks after Mary Esther was born, he had spotted a soiled Ben Franklin half-dollar next to a tossed-away beer can and picked it up. It had been his lucky day. But all the days were lucky, recently. He reminded himself to give thanks to somebody or something. He would start with Patsy.

He made his way back to the house, mud chuckling underneath his boots, Ben Franklin in his pocket, the first fifty cents of Mary Esther’s college fund. He had a secret he had not told Patsy, though she probably knew it: he did not think that he had any clue to being a parent. Not one. His father had died before he might have shown him the fatherhood tricks — all Saul could remember was his father making scrambled eggs for the family on Saturday mornings. Saul’s mother, Delia, had not tried to find a substitute for the boys once their father was gone. Perhaps Saul would fail at fatherhood and they would take his daughter away from him on grounds of parental incompetency. He did not love being a parent, though he loved his daughter with a newfound intensity close to hysteria. To him, fatherhood was one long unrevisable bourgeois script full of long-expected plot turns and predictable blow-ups in the third act, but that was the script he had been handed, and now he was in the play.

Love, rage, and tenderness disabled him in the chairs in which he sat, miming calm, holding Mary Esther. What was the matter with him? He loved his daughter. It was himself he had a problem with. He just didn’t know what the problem was, although his therapist in Chicago had once told him that he suffered from “pointless remorse” and “inappropriate longings.” His typical despairs were beginning to look like luxuries to him. He could be a despair junkie and a virtuoso of fretfulness but probably not anymore, not with a daughter around. Somehow he would have to discard his friends, the long-term discontents, those houses of metaphysical yearnings where he had once made his home. Probably he couldn’t go over to Holbein College anymore on weekends and pretend to be a student. He came in and thanked Patsy with a kiss. But that night, when Patsy was fast asleep, Saul knelt on the landing and beat his fists on the stairs, but softly, so as not to awaken anybody.

On the morning when Mary Esther was celebrating her birthday — she was four weeks old — they sat at the breakfast table with the sun, in a rare appearance, blazing in through the east window and reflecting off the butter knife. With one hand, Patsy fed herself corn flakes. With the other hand she held Mary Esther, who was nursing. Patsy was also glancing down at the morning paper on the table and was talking to Saul about his upcoming birthday, what color shirt to get him. She chewed her corn flakes thoughtfully and only reacted when Mary Esther sucked too hard. It hurt, and it showed on Patsy’s face. A deep brown, she said. You’d look good in that. It’d show off your eyes.

Listening, Saul watched them both, rattled by the domestic sensuality of their pairing, and his spirit shook with wild, bruised, jealous love. He felt pointless and redundant, a citizen of the tiny principality of irony. His heart, that trapped bird, flapped in its cage. Patsy’s breast belonged to him, he thought, not to Mary Esther, even though she could make better use of it than he could. He was ashamed of being jealous of his baby daughter, and he squirmed in his chair as he finished his oatmeal. Actually, he realized, Patsy’s breast belonged to Patsy. Behind Patsy the kitchen spice rack displayed its orderly contents. Everything in the house was orderly, thanks to Patsy, everything except Saul. A delivery truck rumbled by on Whitefeather Road. He felt specifically his shallow and approximate condition. In broad daylight, night enfolded him.

He went off to work feeling superfluous and ecstatic and horny, his body glowing with its fatherly confusions.

That semester, Saul had been pulled from one section of American history and had been reassigned to remedial English for learning-disabled students in the high school. “Anyone can teach English,” his principal, Zoltan Kabelá , liked to say. “It’s our mother tongue.” Zoltan, speaking for the school, had claimed that the economic times being what they were, the district could not afford a full-time specialist in remedial education, and because Saul had been a persistent advocate of the rights of the learning-disabled at school meetings and elsewhere, and because, he suspected, Zoltan Kabelá did not like him, he had been assigned a group of seven kids in remedial writing, and they all met in a converted storage room at the back of the school at eight-thirty, following the second bell.

Five of them were pleasant and sweet-tempered and bewildered (by life, by Saul, by most of what happened to them day after day, the confusing pageant of getting dressed, taking the bus, and telling time), but two of them appeared to hate the class and, very convincingly, Saul himself, their hatred occasionally focused to a fine point on him. They sat, these two, as far away from him as possible, near the back wall close to the brooms, whispering to each other and smiling with energetic young-adolescent malevolence at him. Saul had tried everything with them— jokes, praise, discipline — but nothing had worked to increase the boys’ interest in reading or to lower their scorn for education, and he had arrived at a state of strong, steady uneasiness, a feeling that soon they would try to enact some awfulness upon him, a terrible dangerous prank. He could feel it coming.

He thought of the two boys, Gordy Himmelman and Bob Pawlak, as the Child Cossacks. They belonged in Central Asia somewhere. However, interesting hatred could arise anywhere. Gordy apparently had no parents, just an aunt. His mother had died in a house fire, and his father had gone west and stayed there and had gradually disappeared. No one knew where he was; he had not been heard from in years. Gordy lived with his aunt in a manufactured home on the north side of town. Marly Albertson, the school social worker assigned to Gordy, said the situation out there at Brenda Bagley’s house — Brenda Bagley was Gordy’s aunt— was like a museum of creepiness and warned him not to ask about it if he didn’t want to know. Saul had met Brenda once. She had an unattractiveness so painful to look upon that you felt guilty of rubbernecking if you glanced at her twice. When she came in for a conference, her facial complexion looked scaly, and she sat down with the slow elaborate courtesy of working people out of their element in a classroom, the unease of the uninvited. She gave the appearance of knowing that she was not wanted anywhere she happened to be. She had said almost nothing for the fifteen minutes during which Saul described Gordy’s failings. She appeared to be broken down by hard work — she was a waitress at the Fleetwood— and she nodded dumbly at everything Saul told her, as if his desolate words were no more than what she had expected, wounds on top of wounds.