Charles Baxter - Saul and Patsy

Patsy and Saul glanced at each other.

“But the main thing is, Saul, you have to be my best man, and the other main thing is how beautiful Emmy is.” As if under silent orders for a fixed routine, he then sat down and did a runner’s stretch on the other side of the coffee table, with one leg behind him and one in front. “What a beautiful daughter. You two are so lucky. Except for living in Five Oaks.”

“Well, there’s another one coming,” Patsy said, patting herself, ignoring his remark about their very wonderful city. She explained to Howie that this one was a boy and that the due date was May thirteenth.

Howie stood up, holding his arms entangled with each other in front and then behind him, wrenching them from side to side for flexibility.

“Hey, congratulations. Or do you withhold congratulations until the baby is born? Patsy,” he said, “there’s one thing I have to ask about. When you came home, you said the scapegoating had started. What did you mean?”

He lowered himself to the floor. While he did several push-ups, Patsy told him about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. Saul sat in his chair, watching his brother’s exercises without commenting on them or on the Gordy Himmelman story that Patsy was telling. Public calesthenics had seemingly turned into acceptable social behavior. The only time Saul allowed himself a reaction occurred when Patsy reported that she had talked to Anne McPhee and then had driven over to Brenda Bagley’s house. Saul’s face took on a raised-eyebrow attentiveness. Howie’s reaction was minimal, though he had a peevish expression as he listened and exercised, as if the story were a mind pollutant.

“You do have to get out of this place,” Howie told them tonelessly, finishing his last push-up and taking a breather in a sitting position, his hands on his hips.

“Nothing doing,” Saul said. “I’m staying. I have to. I’m on a mission. We are.”

“And what would that mission be?” He took on an expression of petulance.

“I don’t know,” Saul explained. “In due time, the mission will reveal itself.”

“Your mission is to get out of the Midwest, Saul, before something here balls up its fist and hits you. Come out to the Bay Area. We’ll go into business together.”

“Well,” Saul said, “I’m going to bed. See you in the morning, maybe.”

“I made up the guest room,” Patsy told Howie, yawning. “Uh, Howie, could you tell me one thing, before you go to bed?”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Saul told me when we were upstairs that you were going to give us some money.”

“I already have given you some money. Well, not money, but equities. That is, I’ve bought some stocks and put them in Saul’s name. You’re my family, you see. Anyone would do this. And I thought it was time to spread the wealth around. There’s money to spare. I won’t miss it.”

“How much is this?”

“About two million dollars,” Howie said. “But it’s not in blue chips. They’re kind of risky little companies, what I bought you. Lots of marginal enterprises . Techno stocks, things like that, e-commerce stuff. That’s how I. . well, never mind. The thing is, you shouldn’t sell them. You should hold on to them for years. If you sell them, you’ll be sorry. You can just go on right here with your lit — your life now as it is. Pretend all this money doesn’t exist.”

“You’re kidding! We can’t take this!” Patsy said. “You have to be joking! You can’t give us two million dollars! You can’t. That’s crazy. We’ll be ruined.”

“Yes, I can,” he said, heading toward the stairs, his hand already on the newel post.

“I’m not taking any of this. . largesse, ” Patsy said. “I’m giving it all back to you.”

“Actually,” Howie said, just before he turned around, “the stocks are already in Saul’s name. If you want to give them away, it’s his decision, to tell you the honest truth.”

“What would we do with two million dollars?” Patsy cried out in agony.

“Anything you want.”

In the middle of the sleepless night (to her surprise and dismay, Saul had fallen asleep immediately — a very aggressive thing for him to have done), on one of her several trips to the bathroom to pee, Patsy heard a spattering sound like that of a bird flying into a window, and then another: two impacts. Whack — pause — wham. They came from downstairs, and Patsy could feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up. One blow was an accident; but two were deliberate. Two meant intention and human volition. Two meant harm.

The floor, as she ran down to the living room, felt unclean and unwelcoming to her bare feet, no longer hers, provisional: the carpeting was gritty and the wood slats squeaked. In the living room Patsy stood in darkness, studying the front window, where two egg yolks and the raw white of the egg surrounding them dribbled down the glass windowpane. Far in the distance she saw the white bleached albino hairs as the Himmel-perpetrators disappeared into the night.

So it had started. Somewhere, out there in the dark, someone had thrown two raw eggs at the house, and then, in all probability, had run off, sick with laughter or righteousness. Gordy, with his visits, was gone physically but now his substitutes were doing their methodical retributive work. Perhaps there would be escalation: rotten tomatoes, toilet paper, followed by firecrackers, then arson, then, finally, gunshots. Or painted swastikas. Of the punishing of good deeds there would be no discernible end. All at once the idea of owning a handgun made perfect sense to her. Staring out through the window, she crossed her arms over her chest. But she didn’t feel like herself; her body was always surprising her nowadays. Her breasts were so big, she still wasn’t used to them. Her feet were swollen, and her arms were getting thick and muscular.

Her mouth had gone instantly dry and she could hear what remained of her saliva as she swallowed.

It wasn’t her own safety she worried about so much as that of her children. Emmy and Theo didn’t deserve encirclement, to be brought up as the stigmatized children of God’s outcasts, or, even worse, as the children of millionaires.

When she returned to the upstairs hallway, Howie was standing there in his pajamas. Even in the dark he had an aura about him, attractive at the surface level but not quite to her taste at any particular depth. Getting up from bed, he would still be perfectly groomed, forever unmussed, his hair in order, his odors still concealed by soap and cologne. The stink of humanity was absent from him.

“What happened?” he whispered. He was studying her nightgown gnomishly, but in the dark there was precious little to see. “I heard something.”

“Weren’t you sleeping?”

“I never sleep,” he said, with a trace of pride. His face in the near-dark had a perfect symmetry, the eyes like gentle X-rays. Patsy noticed his chest and thought: Hmm, family resemblance.

“Well, we got egged.”

Mary Esther muttered quietly in her sleep from one room, and Saul groaned in his sleep from another. They were alike in that respect: they both vocalized in their dreams.

“You got what? Egged?” He leaned forward toward her.

“It’s complicated. The kids around here think we’re responsible for that boy, Gordy’s, suicide. They’ve formed a Gordy cult. It’s called Himmelism. Goth stuff. Come down and see for yourself,” she said. She took his hand and led him across the hallway toward the stairs, where she let go of him and reached out for the sticky bannister, grubby from child-and-baby productions.

On the first floor, she led him to the front room and showed him the egg yolks on the window.