Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

How had he found Saul and Patsy’s new residence? He just had. Bystanders tended to give information willingly, greedily, to Howie. The charm, the charisma, did the trick every time.

First Gordy Himmelman’s death this past summer, and now this.

No, that was wrong: he loved his brother.

Nevertheless.

Saul still wasn’t moving. He wouldn’t budge. No budging, not a bit of it. He wasn’t going to move until Howie did. As the guest, Howie was supposed to get out of the car and ring the doorbell before the noises of greeting fell on him like so much rain.

They hadn’t said a word to each other, and already they had a standoff. Because Halloween was three nights away, Saul half-expected Howie to remove himself from the BMW dressed in a costume — that of an ordinary man, a role he had never successfully played. But no: he probably wouldn’t get out of his trophy car until Saul came running downstairs, came charging out the front door, his arms wide, his face joyously radiant with the startled welcome, the glee, the sheer human pleasure of being in his brother’s company again after so long an absence, now that Howie had deigned to visit without warning.

Maybe he, Saul, should dress up in a costume himself, the Gordy Himmelman clothes piled on the floor in his closet. That would surprise Howie.

But no. That, Saul thought, was what he — Saul — would not do. He would not rush downstairs. He would not dress up, or down. He wouldn’t give his brother the satisfaction.

Half of any manipulative strategy had to do with how you arrived and how you departed.

The German motor ticked quietly as it cooled. This standoff was like several others the two brothers had had. Howie wasn’t passive so much as immobile, a Don Juan of stillness: he liked everyone to come to him so that he might gain the advantage of not making the first move. This was the dubious legacy of a childhood marked by illness and indisposition and the death of a parent. He had been born one month premature, a blue baby — incubated — and as an infant he was jaundiced and scrawny and tearful. One of Saul’s first memories was of his mother carrying the misbegotten Howie around the house on a pale-blue goosedown pillow, as if any sudden move might break him. Soon after his birth, Howie had proved to be allergic to breast milk — the metaphoric implications of this were not lost on him as an adult — and he continued to be lactose intolerant. He had suffered from anemia, earaches, uncommon food and substance allergies (carpeting made him sneeze, cats made him choke, he might die if he ate a peanut, and he could not mow a lawn), and repeated bouts of childhood flu and bronchial troubles had kept him in bed for weeks. He had had multiple strep infections and one incidence in middle school of rheumatic fever. In high school he came down with pneumonia and missed classes for a month.

“Be careful of Howie,” his mother always used to say to Saul. “He’s very fragile.”

After their father’s death — Howie said he could hardly remember him (Saul doubted this) and would never speak of him — Delia seemed to direct the few motherly concerns she had toward Howie in the furtherance of his well-being. Saul she left alone. With Saul, it was hands-off anarcho-laissez-faire parenting all the way. She treated Saul like a wonderful, charming guest or a performer in a rather dull show. But with Howie, the slightest sign of postnasal drip could mean another desperate search of The Merck Manual for symptoms, along with worried consulations with the long-suffering pediatrician, Dr. Greene. Howie had really made his illnesses work . Every time Howie got sick, he somehow came out, personally, in the profit column.

Sickly children with distant or absent parents have a tendency to become unattractive adolescents, Saul believed: bent-over, whining selfpitiers, autoerotic virtuosi of hypochondria. Unable to make conversation, they give themselves the attention and care they receive from no one else. But something had turned the other way with Howie. Saul watched with disbelief as his little brother gradually acquired a glow from some mysterious source, a light in his eyes that was somehow related to the animal kingdom. The growth hormones that in other boys produced acne, simian proportions, quick tempers, and cantaloupe-shaped heads, produced in Howie an eerie grace and beauty. From his years of illness he also acquired an inner quiet and watchfulness and a finely honed skill at manipulation.

He had large, liquid eyes — now like a doe, now like an owl.

In high school, Howie had led around a long trail of girlfriends, not to mention a host of bewildered guys who were friends of his but who also seemed to have fallen under his spell. Saul suspected that his brother would sleep with anything as long as it was beautiful. Howie had become a beauty snob, though he practiced secrecy about his love interests and never explained where he was going or whom he was seeing in his nocturnal prowlings. But he had also become rugged, given to endurance sports like rock climbing and marathon racing and soccer. He fought his sickliness with everything he had, and in the process had evolved into a man in whom contradictory male and female traits were mixed equally, producing a sleek, androgynous charm. He had a weakness for mirrors and stood before them for long periods when he thought no one else was observing him, studying the tough, beautiful mystery of himself.

Watching Howie grow into manhood was like reading two biographies, one of Teddy Roosevelt and the other of Greta Garbo, going back and forth between the two, getting the personalities mixed up.

Their father had died of a heart attack while driving to work the year when Howie was eight years old and Saul ten. In the Baltimore funeral home, following the memorial service, there transpired a scene that Saul would always remember whenever he thought of Howie. Howie had been seated on a metal folding chair in the corner, behind a table where the two Bunn-o-Matic coffeemakers were positioned, along with the cream, the sugar, and the Styrofoam cups. Friends and acquaintances of their father milled around the room, bending down to Delia and Saul to offer consolation. Howie refused to talk to anyone. With a manly and stoical expression on his face, Howie sat quietly there in the corner, the tears streaming down his cheeks, unsociable in his grief. He had loved his father, whose death was, Saul thought, a permanent injury for which Howie would never have words. The luster had simply gone out of everything. Later, in the house, when more friends of their parents dropped by, Howie found another corner to sit in, where he would cry inconsolably, then wipe his eyes and stand up and make brave conversation and eat cookies, before sitting down in his corner to cry, inconsolably, again.

Delia never remarried — out of loyalty, Saul thought, not to her late husband but to Howie.

Saul and Howie had tried some brother-to-brother male bonding once a few years ago on a long-distance bicycle trip. They had set off from Baltimore and had made it as far as Chicago. They did not speak much about personal matters during their evenings together: each had brought several books to ward off that possibility. They discussed the route, their provisions, the locations where they would camp or the motels where they would stay. Or they would confer about the bicycles, the condition of the gears and the tires.

Saul had been in charge of the maps, because he claimed he was good at maps. Howie was apathetic about their route. They stayed on back roads day after day and, after three weeks had passed, made their way carefully past the tangle of outlying Chicago neighborhoods toward Lake Michigan, which Howie had never seen. They had been bicycling in the northwest side of the city, avoiding traffic in the early morning, weaving their way through Greektown and heading for Lincoln Park, when Howie braked too suddenly, swerved, and hit the curb in front of a Greek restaurant, the Acropolis. He went flying over the handlebars and landed on the sidewalk, his belongings — which had broken loose from his pack — scattered around him.