Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

“Oh, yeah. Everybody’s trying to look like Gordy. Isn’t that something? He’s a star.”

“That’s right. And she said I should talk to you.”

“Why?”

“She said people are blaming us. Saul and me.”

“Oh, are they? For what?”

“I don’t know. That’s the thing. For Gordy? For Sam? Why would they blame us?”

“You’re asking me? What would I have to do with it?”

“Well,” Patsy said, “she said I should ask you. She said we had unfinished business with you. She said I should come here right away.”

“I just go to work, and then I come home, Patsy. I’m a waitress, you know, at the Fleetwood. It’s not like I circulate .”

“I know.”

“All I do is sometimes talk to the customers. Look at him over there,” Brenda Bagley said, aiming her face at the photograph. “There he is, Gordy, with his dad. Only picture the two of them ever took together.”

“It must have been hard, trying to be his mother and dad, just you alone with him here.”

“Yeah, well,” Brenda Bagley said.

“What was his name?” Patsy asked. “The father?”

“Rufus. Rufus Himmelman. I thought you knew. People called him Rowdy for a while. Then they called him Ray. He had aliases. Names didn’t stick to him. Ray, Rick, Rob — he went through a lot of the R names. He could have been anything, I guess.” She waited. “But what he really was, was a con,” she said quickly. “He needed different names in his lines of work.”

“How come you took over the care of Gordy?” Patsy asked.

“It’s a long story. With the mother dead in that fire, somebody had to do it.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Patsy said suddenly. “His father leaving and not coming back or asking about him. Disappearing like that. Then you, being Gordy’s guardian.”

“Oh, you think it doesn’t make sense?” Brenda Bagley stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and promptly lit another one. She gave Patsy a broad and very angry smile. Patsy waited for the Big Speech that usually follows the angry smile in the movies. But often there is no Big Speech and no explanation, just the angry smile, which then subsides as the cigarette rises to the mouth, and smoke is inhaled and exhaled. Not everyone had the resources of instant articulation. Once again, Patsy saw herself and her daughter and Brenda Bagley reflected on the blank TV screen, though they didn’t look like people on TV but like themselves: a toddler needing a diaper change, a frazzled woman with a cigarette, and an anxious and pregnant young mother. Then Brenda Bagley said, “Men leave their children all the time for parts unknown, you know, and they don’t come back for years, if they come back. Well, I don’t care. Maybe it don’t make any sense, but I took over the boy’s raising anyway. Nobody and nothing was offering to marry me . Didn’t have a boyfriend back then, or now either, and no children of my own to attend to, so I thought: he’s the only one I’ll ever get. Gordy will be mine. You see this face?”

She meant her own. Of course Patsy saw it. It was right in front of her, staring at her like a peeled tangerine with eyes. She nodded.

“I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: With a face like that, no man would marry her. You know, nobody in my life ever called me ‘pretty.’ That’s a word I only heard about. I heard it applied to the other girls and then to the women I knew, but I sure never heard it applied to me. Bad skin all my life, and nothing the doctors could do. Dermatologists! Everybody said, ‘Oh, Brenda, she’s so polite and kindly,’ and then they’d go off behind my back and say that my face looked like the craters of the moon. Soon as somebody’s down, they start kicking at her just for the fun of it. And now here you come around, asking this and that, as if you got the right.”

Patsy sat silent while Emmy continued to squirm, arching her back. She was crying quietly. Gathering her wits, Patsy said, “That wasn’t what I wanted to inquire about. It was all these children, trying to look like Gordy. And the blame for what happened to Sam Cole.”

“What do you think I have to do with them?” Brenda asked. “You think I’m giving them orders? You can’t give a child orders. Well, you can, but it’s a joke.”

“No. It’s just. . have you been saying things about Saul and me? Anne McPhee said we were outcasts of God.”

“Are you? Didn’t know that God cared that much. Well, that’s just her opinion. I don’t know as I’ve said that.”

“People listen to you.”

“People certainly don’t listen to me.”

“Oh, I’m sure they do.”

“They never have. You think I have any influence with anybody? Where’d you get that idea?”

“Anne McPhee,” Patsy repeated.

“What does she know about outcasts of God?”

“I don’t know what she knows,” Patsy said, feeling as if her time was up.

“I’m the expert on outcasts of God,” Brenda Bagley said huffily, and with an odd touch of snobbery. “I’ve got everyone beat on that score.”

“Would you do me a favor, then?” Patsy asked. “Would you please tell people that Saul and I had nothing to do with Gordy’s death? We didn’t do it, we didn’t influence it, we’re sorry it happened, we’re miserable about it — can you say that, please, if people start asking?” She did not mention that Gordy’s ghost was, at this very moment, sitting in the car, waiting. The time was not right for a revelation of that sort.

“I guess I could say that if you want me to,” Brenda Bagley muttered, as if she was thinking about something else. “If anyone cares to know. I might mention it. But I want you to come see something first.”

“What?”

“Gordy’s bedroom.” She stood up without warning, then clumped down the narrow hallway in the opposite direction from the kitchen. After a pause, she made a windmilling motion for Patsy to follow her. Patsy picked up Mary Esther, who seemed to be watching something floating invisibly in the air in front of her, and carried her into Gordy’s bedroom.

The room smelled of boy-mildew and had one overhead light. On the north wall Gordy had cut out and pasted up, with adhesive tape, magazine photos of soldiers in camouflage clothing, holding their guns. They were walking through jungles. They were crawling through rice paddies and marshes. They had determined and brave killer expressions on their faces. In other pictures they were firing their guns or shouting the war shout as they plunged into battle. Movie stars dressed as soldiers were among them. It was standard stuff. So were the cartoons of superheroes cut out and pasted next to them. Near these pictures was a small poster of Wolverine, the superhero, the X-man, with his razor fingers, and another one of the same guy, in rage-against-the-world mode, beast mode. Patsy wondered why, if Gordy couldn’t read, he had all these comic-book figures pasted onto his bedroom wall.

“He loved Wolverine,” Brenda Bagley said.

Patsy felt herself indeliberately startle. In the midst of all this warfare and welter was a photo of Mary Esther as a small baby, the one with her leaning against the back of the sofa, her stuffed gnome in her lap. It was the picture that Saul had handed out in class. She rested there, an illustration of a baby, among the soldiers and superheroes and archvillains.

Patsy was finding it difficult to breathe.

“People said he couldn’t read,” Brenda Bagley was saying, “but he sat in here with those comic books of his, and the other magazines, X-men and so on, and I sure thought he was doing something, and if it wasn’t reading, I don’t know what it was.”

Also on the wall above the headboard was a picture of a beehive. Good Christ, the sadness of things.