Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Gordy hadn’t been suicidal. Still, he had committed suicide. The logic of this confounded everybody.

The superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, called a meeting of faculty and concerned parents and family members one week after Gordy’s death. The meeting was held in the high school auditorium on a Tuesday night. The season being summer, the hallways smelled of floor cleanser, and no one seemed to know how to get all the proper lights directed to the podium on the stage — Harry Bell, the custodial engineer, was on a fishing trip up north — with the result that Superintendent Vermilya, a pumpkin-faced overweight man with a buzzcut and slit-lens reading glasses perched at the tip of his nose, stood speaking to everyone in semidarkness, as did the psychiatric social worker who had been hired to consult and to give advice about the grieving process. The lights were shining on the rear of the auditorium stage, but the superintendent and the social worker by necessity stood in the front, and the effect was that of a poorly rehearsed show. They were probably kind people who meant well. The problem was, Saul thought, there was no grieving because the grief had no source or origin, as grief must. They were disposing of a boy whom nobody liked, who had already disposed of himself. Good intentions didn’t mean much in a struggle with emptiness.

Patsy, carrying Mary Esther, estimated the crowd at about seventy, but no one except Saul seemed particularly sorrow-stricken, and Saul’s mournfulness was freakish; it was not clearly understood by anyone, including Saul. Everyone else had shown up out of curiosity or dutiful-ness. Gordy Himmelman hadn’t made much of an impression on any of his other teachers, Saul discovered, and when he had, the impressions were unfavorable. He had drifted, unloved and unsought, down the birth canal out of the womb, and then, in school, he had drifted from kindergarten onward and upward to the more challenging grades, where he had made his mark by a more accelerated drift toward failure, the boy being mostly friendless and frictionless, slipping and sliding toward his own death, and hostile to those who wanted to help him. Then he destroyed himself, and here, now, were the undestroyed, convening to talk.

After stepping up to the ill-lighted podium, the superintendent said that he had spoken to both of the Bernsteins, Saul and his wonderful wife, Patsy, who had witnessed this terrible event, and he had spoken to Gordy Himmelman’s guardian and next of kin, his aunt, Brenda Bagley, who had owned the gun in question. The sheriff’s office had investigated, and the medical examiner was doing an autopsy to check for a possible drug or alcohol component and to rule out any other possible contributing medical causes. Gordy’s behavior had been observed to be erratic. The boy had been a behavioral problem, certainly, with a learning disability, but he was not particularly exceptional in this regard. So far no one, it appeared, was to blame. Besides, he was a dropout from school. “It was extremely fortunate,” the superintendent said, underlining certain phrases by lowering his voice an octave, “that no one else was hurt.” Then he stifled a yawn.

The collective judgment was that Gordy Himmelman had taken a tragic interest in guns. He had never been properly trained in their use. He played with guns to give himself a feeling of power — to compensate for his poor work at school and for his social failures. The suicide had certain aspects of an accident. Like other troubled youths, especially impulsive young men, Gordy Himmelman had, tragically — his voice once again dropped an octave— taken the easy way out . A life had been snuffed, like a candle’s flame, but after the inquiries so far it appeared to have been nobody’s fault, the superintendent had repeated. “Mistakes were made,” he said, “but we cannot say who made them. Let’s say that we all made them. And let’s go on from there. We can’t dwell forever in the past. The past,” he said, “is a canceled check. We expect never to have another incident like this in Five Oaks. Therefore, we have invited Jane Henderson to help us out.”

The psychiatric social worker, Jane Henderson, who had been brought in from Holbein College, carried her coffee cup to the podium. She was a brisk and efficient woman in her late thirties. Saul thought she had the hardened professionalism of a business consultant: the glaring half-smile, the chignon, the pitiless rules of thumb, the overenunciated words combined with common sense set out in formulated phrases. She assured the audience that teen suicides were terrible tragedies and, furthermore, that they were now epidemic. Terrible as Gordy’s death was, however, it was important to recognize that it had been one of many such suicides all across the United States, each one of them tragically preventable. Saul noticed that the word “tragic” was cropping up repeatedly, compulsively, though no one really meant it or felt it. “I am sorry to report to you,” she said, “that your community is only the latest to have suffered from this terrible plague. What can we do? We can do something. We can empower ourselves. We can watch for signs of trouble.” She then listed, using a PowerPoint demonstration, the ten warning signs of a tragically troubled teen — including clothing signs, verbal signs, gestural signs, the closed doors, the sullenness, the touchiness in response to questions. Gordy had exhibited four and one-half of these signs. He could have been spotted and helped out; at the very least, he could have been given counseling and, perhaps, medication.

“You have to be alert,” Jane Henderson said. “These events can precipitate into a contagion in a community like ours.”

Saul sat with his head in his hands. You couldn’t answer human disorder like Gordy’s with PowerPoint demonstrations. He now wished he had never brought those baby pictures into his remedial-reading class.

Harold reported to Saul that Gordy’s death was the biggest and sometimes the only topic of conversation in the barbershop, and the talk often implicated Saul and Patsy, but ambiguously and circularly, and only because they had been standing nearby in the house when Gordy’s gun went off in the front yard. What had he been doing on their lawn, in front of that tree? What had he been doing there, off and on, all that year? No one could explain. It was mystifying, and Saul knew that his and Patsy’s proximity to Gordy’s death would mark them as accessories to the mystification.

The boy hadn’t previously threatened to kill himself or anyone else. He had displayed the gun the way other boys displayed their baseball cards. There had been no desperate spoken ultimatums. He hadn’t seemed particularly unhappy; he wasn’t atypical, unless you counted his attention deficits. As the days went on, Saul thought that Gordy had fired a bullet into his brain on a whim. MAD IN AMERICA. . that was Gordy all over, committing suicide as a weirdly unpromising practical joke. Or: he had performed an auto-jihad. Even Bob Pawlak had no explanation. “Total surprise to me,” he said, shrugging. The autopsy turned up no drugs or alcohol in Gordy’s bloodstream. The other possibility, of a genuine despair, was somehow unthinkable in Gordy’s case. Certainly the gun itself wasn’t to blame. Was it? In any case, after the medical examiner’s autopsy, there was no funeral and no memorial service and no reminiscences about the boy. Gordy’s family couldn’t afford a funeral, his aunt had said (really, since no one except the aunt wanted to acknowledge him as kin, there was no family), and no one had much of anything to remark about Gordy’s life, such as it had been. What could you say about him? Like God, he was who he was. He was close to invisible, and then he had erased the only visibility he had. She said she would just scatter his ashes out in back of the trailer where he had lived. When Saul began to inquire over the telephone about this economizing, Gordy’s aunt asked him: What about Gordy, did he think, was worth remembering? He was better off held back in the past without anybody creating too much of a fuss over him now, she said. It occurred to Saul that Gordy’s aunt thought that suicides were shameful and that she had to get rid of him in a hurry. When she used those school words, “held back,” Saul felt himself shiver, as if someone’s fingers soaked in ice water were traveling down his spine. “No use crying over that boy anymore, no earthly use that I can see,” she said, in a call she made to Saul on a Saturday afternoon. “I’ve cried enough. Leave him be, resting in peace. Don’t you want him to rest in peace?”