Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

The child Cossack, he thought, my adversary, he deserved better than this.

“Yes,” he said. “Only it makes me angry that he killed himself.”

“Angry?”

“Sure. I get mad when I think about it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t get mad about it,” she said. “I wouldn’t get riled up.” Saul didn’t have the impression that she really wanted to talk to him anymore; her voice had a smoky flaring-up and fading-back. She went on talking in her dazed way. “You aren’t responsible or anything. I’m not going to sue you or anybody else, is what I’m saying,” she said. “Despite what some people have been suggesting to me. Don’t you worry about that. I’m not going after your money now. Besides, I already thanked you for your generosity.”

Saul knew better than to respond, especially about money. After taking another breath, Brenda Bagley said that she was sorry that she hadn’t hidden the gun any better than she had. Gordy had found it squirreled away in a shoe box in her closet, where she had thought he’d never find it.

On the afternoon following this conversation, he and Brenda Bagley drove to the Five Oaks Funeral Home and picked up Gordy’s ashes in a plastic box. The funeral director, Lewis Binch, was an affable man in a pinstriped suit, perfectly tailored; his eyes were alert and searching in an Irish manner — the entire face displayed a resigned, comic intelligence as he sat behind his desk in his office, offering good-humored consolation. He seemed well acquainted with grief and was not frightened of it. Saul wondered how he hadn’t met this funeral director before; he wanted him as a friend and took his business card, hoping for another occasion to meet prior to a death, especially his own.

The box of ashes was as big as a dictionary, and its contents rattled; Saul estimated its weight at about twelve pounds. After driving Brenda Bagley back home, he carried the box into her trailer, following her. As soon as she was inside, she turned on the enormous television set and stood for a moment to see what programs were on. “You can put it over there,” she said, pointing to a sofa on which a white cat slept, while she watched the TV screen, as an old sea captain would watch a lighthouse. Saul laid the box of ashes on the sofa opposite the cat. He left without saying goodbye, while she went on watching the TV screen, avoiding shipwreck, though she waved absentmindedly as he walked out the door.

After the summer storms and the articles about Gordy’s death in the Five Oaks News-Chronicle, accompanied by a lengthy and hard-hitting editorial about troubled children and guns, and the terrible inexplicable epidemic of student violence in American schools, Patsy went to her OB-GYN and confirmed what she already knew, that she was newly pregnant. She did not say that Gordy’s death had inspired the two of them to create this child; some things you didn’t have to tell Saul.

When she informed Saul that night at dinner about her pregnancy, he stood up at the table and walked over to where she sat to kiss her and hug her. His joy was manufactured for her benefit — she could instantly tell— but manufactured joy was better than none at all, and she admired his efforts to be glad on her behalf. He himself would be glad spontaneously, in time. His feelings needed some duration to establish themselves on whatever solid ground Saul might find.

The stain of Gordy’s blood on the linden wouldn’t wash off: Saul had tried soapsuds and Clorox, sponging the bark of the tree, until it came to him that he was being just like Gordy’s aunt, trying to wash all traces of him away, and he stopped.

For a week after that he watched television. It was like taking a bath in forgetfulness. Whatever they had on television wasn’t good or bad: it was just television. If you put a Vermeer on television, it stopped being a Vermeer and turned into something else on television.

Sometimes he watched with Mary Esther perched in his lap. He combed her hair idly, shook her music-box teddy bear, bounced her, fed her, read Pat the Bunny, and sang “Little Red Caboose” to her when the mood struck him. He began to hope for certain commercials to reappear, the ones with happy tunes. Whenever she fussed, he carried her around the house and then outside. He did not sleep consistently at night. He wasn’t unhappy, nor was he depressed; he just wasn’t anything — this was how he explained it to himself. He was preoccupied by a certain variety of nothingness, full of colors and moods. It was a kingdom, and he had just made his respectful way through the front gate. Patsy stayed up with him as long as she could, holding his hand, and then she went to bed.

It made no sense to try to love one’s enemy when the enemy was already dead. It was a stupid spiritual practice, and Christian, besides.

After enduring another week of this, Patsy came downstairs one morning and told Saul that he should take a trip somewhere, anywhere, just for a few days, to let the miles soak up in him. He needed to travel, to watch the telephone poles fly by in their sedative manner. It wasn’t that she wanted him out of the house; she just thought that he needed to get away. He didn’t hunt or fish — he didn’t have any of those male outdoorsy escape valves — but he could at least go to one or two cities and visit the museums. That would be a nice Saul thing to do, she said, before school started again and he found himself extemporizing in one classroom or another. She could manage Mary Esther on her own for a few days.

Following her advice, he called ahead to a few friends and then packed several days’ worth of clean clothes. He didn’t like to fly because airport terminals and their long receding concourses reminded him of gigantic vacuum-cleaner hoses sucking him and everyone else into nullity. He preferred taking the train.

At the doors of the Detroit Amtrak station he leaned into the car and kissed Patsy and Mary Esther goodbye. He took the train to Washington on a coach ticket he had bought on the Web. He arrived at Union Station three hours late. For two nights he stayed with a couple he knew, Buzz Henselt and his girlfriend, Sarah. The two of them lived in a walkup near Cleveland Heights in the District and were doing moderately well— Sarah worked for a writers-in-the-schools project, and Buzz, who was good at budget analysis, had landed a job in the Department of Transportation — but Saul realized that he was in a fog and wasn’t keeping up his end of the conversation, particularly when Buzz and Sarah asked him about himself and Patsy and Mary Esther. All he could say was, “Oh, we’re fine,” before lapsing into silence and staring at their Edward Hopper poster (the house, not the nighthawks) framed on the living-room wall, or the Ralston Crawford poster in the dining room. He realized that his presence there was a puzzle to them. He was an inexplicable and unsatisfying guest. He wasn’t terribly interested in them anymore and answered their questions as if he were talking about someone else or taking a quiz, and, no, as it turned out, he didn’t want to go to the National Gallery.

He slept on a cot in their study, close enough to the computer so that he could hear its internal fan whirring all night in sleep mode, almost covering the sounds of Buzz and Sarah’s snoring and snorts and conversations in the next room. Still childless, they hadn’t yet learned how to muffle themselves. In the corner, Buzz and Sarah’s African gray parrot, Jack, muttered and scrabbled about in his cage. The bird had acquired a fiendish expertise for imitating ringing telephones and dripping faucets, and in moments of bravado would imitate Sarah’s asthma wheeze, allergy-related coughing, and gasps during intercourse. “Shut up,” Saul would say, and within hours the bird started to answer, “Shut up.”