Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

She pointed one of her long fingers, decorated with its red nail polish that in the moonlight also looked gray, and he followed where she indicated to the middle of the field, where the albino deer walked with a slight stagger, an arrow sticking out of its back leg, seemingly blinded and wounded now by Saul’s students, the pimply Cossacks. Still, the deer was alive, as it slowly faded back into the dark. Saul considered his options, all of them vague and transitory: he would have tried to run after it, that animal, somehow take its pain away, but for now he was not equipped with the necessary time and energy and speed for that particular kind of rescue.

For the first two weeks after Mary Esther’s birth, Saul and Patsy’s neighbors and friends had called ahead, following country manners, before bringing over dishes of food. Day in and out, the food had accumulated on the kitchen counter and in the refrigerator: chicken-and-noodle casseroles and Jell-O salads and desserts, baked beans, and one poached salmon cooked by a fellow teacher at the school, a subscriber to Gourmet magazine and an avid watcher of the Food Network.

But Saul could be picky. “Well, it’s certainly not Jew food,” he had said after his friend Hugh Welch left. He picked up Hugh’s donated honey-baked ham before he pretended to pass it, like a football, through the kitchen window. “This is pig meat.”

“Don’t complain,” Patsy said. “You’re doing all this for effect. You like ham as much as I do, and you’re just going for cheap laughs.” She took the ham out of his hand and tried to stuff it into the refrigerator, where there was no room for it. “And I like Hugh, besides.”

“Listen, I’m fully assembled in America, but he’s doing this as an ethnic insult, and I’m not being paranoid. At least I don’t think so.”

“Oh, right. Honey,” she said, “calm down.” She turned around and gave him a square smile, beautiful and radiant but not without analytic substance. “You’re an imposter. I’ve seen you eat ham. Ham and sausage and bacon. You’re just playing to the galleries. I suppose next you’ll be keeping kosher. Besides,” she said, “these are gifts, Saul. I’d really appreciate it if you were grateful to your friends, because they’re my friends, too. Stop being a snob.”

“Sometimes they’re only your friends,” he said.

She gave him a long look. “And sometimes they’re only yours.”

“Okay. You want to divide them? Which ones are yours?” he asked. “Which ones aren’t? Let’s divide them up, Patsy, your friends and my friends, and let’s see who has more. The winner has more friends than the loser. The winner gets to go to the state fair for free.”

He stood near the table, balancing on one leg.

“Honey,” she said, “if you want to have a fight, we’ll fight about something actual when you’re ready to do that. And not until then. Actually, not a damn moment before that.”

They had gazed at each other carefully, as if they were entering a new landscape of embittered matrimony, one they had only heard about but never seen until now.

Harold, Saul’s barber, stared down into the crib and at Mary Esther while the meatloaf he had brought cooled under its tinfoil in the kitchen. With the gray March overcast behind her, Mrs. O’Neill, beaming fixedly on the front stoop with her expression of paralyzed charity, offered them a container of the ginger cookies that, despite her aging and memory loss, she could still remember how to make. She had packed the cookies inside a dusty uncleaned goldfish bowl. But she could still not remember the baby’s name after Saul and Patsy had told her three times, and before she left, she said music from somewhere still went through her head, Puccini and Mozart, but she could not remember whether the hour of the day was morning or afternoon, and she was going to have to move herself into a place where there were nurses and people who helped you eat dinner and told you the time. She would not be able to sing arias from opera, once there; she was sure of that. Emory and Anne McPhee gave Patsy a gallon of homemade potato salad preserved in Tupperware; Anne was pregnant again, she said, and couldn’t stay. Harry and Lucia Edmonds, who had worked with Patsy at the bank, brought over a pair of pink baby pajamas, complete with footies, that Lucia had bought at the new outlet mall. Gary Krochock, their neighbor and their insurance agent, also Jewish, dropped off a box of cigars. Mad Dog Bettermine, who had left his girlfriend at home because, he told Saul over the phone, he didn’t want her to get any big ideas about babies and his own potential for fatherhood, grew unexpectedly abashed at the sight of Mary Esther. Having hauled a case of discount no-name beer onto the front porch, he stood quietly over the crib, wordless from baby-fear, staring at Mary Esther, and he could not move until Patsy picked up Mary Esther and Saul took Mad Dog by the arm and guided him out of the room.

Saul removed him to the small back den, gave him a cigar, and from there the two men retired to the back stoop, lighting up and drinking, belching smoke, somehow unable to make conversation. Mad Dog had an odd expression on his face. Saul would have liked to talk to him but didn’t know how. He would have said that fatherhood was great, terrifying, too, of course, but you could handle the terror by imagining yourself having been invited to a large noisy and sloppy party where all the guests made uproar and messes — this was parenthood. Only he didn’t quite believe it was as festive as all that.

But charity was everywhere. Saul had never seen anything like it. Saul’s mother- and father-in-law, Susan and Dick Carlson, arrived after Saul’s mother had left, and they slept in the living room, Susan on the sofa, Dick in a sleeping bag on the floor, during the three days of their visit. Patsy was their only child. During their time in the house, they cooked and cleaned and talked in whispers, like servants. In their quietness, Saul thought they compared favorably to his mother, but they were eerie in their placid and muted operations. They enjoyed companionable and friendly silences — as Delia did not — interrupted by the occasional and characteristic cry of “Here, let me do that.” They said they loved the baby, and Patsy’s mother held Mary Esther with great tenderness, kissing her on the forehead each time she lifted her up and cradled her in her arms and rocked her.

They were sweet to Saul in an airy and distant way, as if they liked the idea of him a bit more than the actuality, and they took great care to defer to him as long as they were in the house: Where were the spare lightbulbs, they would ask, instead of just looking for them. Saul noticed that they often gazed at his hands when they were speaking to him, as if he were about to break into sign language. They treated him like a lovable Martian — and seemed pleased with themselves for being able to love such a creature. “Just you relax,” they often said to him.

After Patsy’s parents departed, Saul could hardly remember that they had been present in the house at all, they removed the traces of themselves so thoroughly. They left no scent behind; they just vanished. His in-laws took an odd sort of pride, in a Protestant way he couldn’t quite pinpoint, in being nearly invisible. They didn’t want anyone to remember that they had ever been anywhere or had been sighted, like rare birds. Some sort of prideful modesty or humility on their part made them withdraw from the footlights in an effort at self-erasure, and it was rather starchy and New England of them. With their mild, quiet voices and their agreeable manner, they didn’t try to assert claims of ownership over Patsy, as his mother certainly would have over him. He tried to remember their faces, Susan’s hair graying in beautiful streaks and Dick’s halfhearted smile, her reading glasses and his Rolex, but all he managed to keep in his head were bits and pieces of their appearance, as if they had evaporated somehow, keeping their souls unviolated and intact and completely private. That was their selfishness, if you wanted to think ill of them. They had no character that they would share. They were charitable with their actions but gave you nothing of themselves, and when they were gone, they were gone for good. All they left behind was a sterling silver teething cup with Mary Esther’s name engraved on it.