Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“A box?”

“Right. I thought you and your husband would want some of the boy’s clothing, your husband being Gordy’s teacher and all, and considering what happened over here. Gordy had his feelings about you both. He just couldn’t stay away. Never did tell me why.” Something about her facial expression does not match what she is saying; her glance has become shrewd and inquisitorial, almost gleefully full of hatred. She is a woman who knows how to exploit her unattractiveness and unhappiness. She has all the considerable resources of the weak: the rags, the incompetence when dealing with catastrophe, the unendurable face, the incorrect tone, the addictions, the cluelessness, the echoing footsteps out of the ravaged town.

For a moment what Gordy’s aunt has said does not register on Patsy at all. Then it does. “What feelings were those? And you mean to say,” pointing at the box, “those are Gordy’s clothes ?”

“Not all the clothes he owned. Just some of them. That’s what I’m telling you,” Brenda says, repeating her confusing ironic bow, a failed gesture of respect, followed by a long inhale. Brenda’s eyes are watering now, and the grief no longer seems to be feigned, though perhaps the tears simply follow the irritating effect of the smoke. Patsy wonders what her grief is based on, if that’s what it is, and where she gets it from. How does a person mourn someone like Gordy Himmelman? Out of what tenderness could it possibly arise? You don’t tear your hair and beat your breast after the demise of a kid like that. Do you? Some questions she does not dare to ask.

And now Saul in his pajamas appears behind Patsy, carrying the cuckoo clock bellows in his left hand. He squeezes it, and a cuckoo’s call rises from his fingers. Life, Patsy thinks, is more dreamlike than any dream. “You’re in your pajamas,” Brenda says. “You sick?”

“Yes,” Saul says without interest. “I am. You?”

“No, not me, not yet. Okay, I’ll stay away from you. Right here is my distance. Well, like I was saying to your wife there, those’re some of his clothes.” She points down to the box, before she pulls up the top flap and reaches in. “A few of his shirts, and a couple pair of pants, and socks. I would like for you to have them.” She lifts up a pair of blue jeans for display. Ash from her cigarette falls on them. “A remembrance gift.” Dark stains decorate the jeans where the ash has not touched them.

“We can’t take them,” Saul says. “They’re Gordy’s.”

“Not anymore, they ain’t. Sure, you can take them. He was right about your size.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m certainly not taking them back,” she says with sudden coldness. “You can do with them what you want, you and your wife, give them away to Goodwill if that’s what you’d like to do, use them as rags. Don’t even have to bring them into the house if you don’t want to, leave ’em out here. I just can’t keep them around, ” she barks out, almost as a scream. “But,” she then says, taking a deep breath as if to compose herself, “now that’s taken care of, there’s another thing I was having to ask you about, on a related matter. I haven’t seen the boy’s father in a couple years. Maybe you know. I tried him in Wyoming and then in Colorado. They never heard of him in either place. I’ve tried everywhere. Police have, too. Vanished from the face of the earth, Rufus has. God, that man was a pure worthless piece of worthlessness. Oh, well. There’s the matter of the expense related to the cremation, and now I’ve got to take care of that by myself as the next of kin.” She peers around Patsy toward Saul, in his pajamas. “And I just can’t.”

“I think I understand,” Saul says. “You want some financial help.” Patsy feels herself physically leaving this scene. She is not going to be here. Let Saul take care of it, she thinks, the money. Let him be the Last American Humanist. Let him exercise his compassion. That’s his sideline. He’s good at that. But she is not going to let him spend their money, including the portion that she herself has earned. Not here. Not now.

“Not in so many words,” Gordy’s aunt says, putting the soiled blue jeans back into the box, after carefully folding them. “What I’m asking is whether you can help out. A contribution. It’s not like we can start a community-wide fund for him. People don’t care for a suicide. That’s not a cause they empty their pockets for.”

“How much?” Saul asks, glancing at Patsy, who seems to be gazing off at the horizon, having somehow managed strategically to space out. She doesn’t seem to be here anymore. No help from her, the professional loan officer. Not a dime for the dead boy’s tribute.

“Whatever you can spare,” Brenda half-whispers. “For the cremation. Or the box?”

“All right,” he whispers back, in sympathy. “You take a check?”

“Whatever you can spare,” Brenda repeats, her eyes filling with tears. “For that poor boy.”

“Make sure it’s your checkbook, honey,” Patsy says, awakening. “Not the joint one.”

“Whatever you can spare. For that poor boy,” Patsy imitates late that night, in the living room. She needs to be callous. A bit of insensitivity allows her to breathe. She feels, and has for most of the afternoon, as if she had been fitted with a whalebone corset. She needs the relief of standoffishness from the harms that pity leaves on her spirit. “Good god, what a performance. And this is—”

“They’re not even going to have a funeral, Patsy. They just need a box or something to bury Gordy in. That’s all.”

“Listen to me.” They’re both sitting on the floor, surrounded by a heap of soiled Gordy-clothing. There are clothes for warm and cold seasons. Flannel shirts, underwear, socks, jeans, corduroys — a mess of dirty stinking fraying fabrics. During the summer the boy had carried with him an odor of hay and old cheese. As the weather turned colder, his aromas mutated and became furry. The December-and-January Gordy had given off the scent of the dogs he probably slept with, and here were the clothes from those months, smelling as if they had come straight from the Humane Society.

She has raised her hand to his shoulder. It rests there a moment and then rises to his face. “You’re not guilty of anything, sweetie. You did nothing wrong. And what happened yesterday here was shocking, and we have every right to be shocked. . ”

“Oh, do you think so?” Saul asks. “I think that adults aren’t shocked. They pretend to be shocked, but they aren’t, not really. It’s a pose.”

“You weren’t shocked? What would it have taken yesterday to shock you?”

“Something else. I wasn’t shocked, ” Saul insists, running his hands through the pockets of Gordy Himmelman’s trousers. “What were we expecting all those months, anyway? That he would eventually go away? We had gotten accustomed to him. No, yesterday I felt something else.”

“Okay.”

He searches her face before speaking. “Oh, I felt surprise, maybe, but that’s different. Here’s a dopey kid whose aunt has a gun and who stands and stands in our front yard without ever telling us what he wanted from us. And, by the way, why were you shocked? You’re the person who worked up the conviction that he was not like us, a nonhuman. That’s the height of sophistication, if you ask me, calling him a nonperson. That was really worldly of you. That was positively European.”

“Okay, Saul,” Patsy says. “Before we have a real fight, let me ask you a question. Between grief and indifference, what is there? There isn’t anything. Show me the typical half-sob and maybe I’ll sort of believe you.”