David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“Did you remember to pick up the cake?” I said.

“I did. Mission accomplished. As our president would say.”

My brother sat down and looked out across the river. “So what do they call that mountain over there?”

“You’re right,” my husband said. “We don’t need to get back into that. As I said, you have to excuse an opinionated old man.”

“I better get started on dinner,” I said. “Can I bring you something? There’s cheese, crackers, olives…”

“I don’t want to get filled up,” my brother said.

“I’m fine, thanks,” my husband said. “I might come in and replenish. How are you doing with yours?”

“Still working away,” my brother said.

In the kitchen, I said, “So how badly did you two get into it?”

“We managed to step back from the brink,” he said. “I keep forgetting there really are people like that.”

“This is where we live,” I said. “You should come over to Kingston with me sometime.”

“No,” he said, “ this is where we live. Thank God. Maybe our lesbian Unitarian could come and exorcise the place once he’s out of here.”

At dinner, my brother reached out his hands to me and my mother. I took his and reached for my husband’s, but my mother said, “I’m sorry, but it’s bad enough being this old without having to humor you . And your pushiness . Which is all this is.”

My brother turned red. You had to feel sorry for him. A little. “I didn’t mean to—you know, I just don’t see that it hurts anybody to give a word of thanks.”

“Well, why don’t we all join hands and say the Lord’s Prayer backward and see if we can get the Devil here?” She turned to me. “Isn’t that what he thinks we do?”

“I really don’t want to get in the middle of this,” I said.

“Okay,” my brother said. “Let’s not ruin your birthday.”

“May I propose a toast?” my husband said. “To a lovely lady, in honor of an occasion I know she’d rather not have mentioned, but which we all celebrate. Many happy returns.”

“You’re very sweet,” she said. “I shouldn’t have caused a scene.”

My brother put his napkin in his lap. “No, I shouldn’t have been so—what you said, pushy. I guess it’s just being around people who, I don’t know, people who are used to—”

“We understand,” I said.

“I, for one,” my mother said, “am going to drink your toast.” She picked up her wineglass, drained what was left, said, “Cheers,” and held the glass out to my husband. “How about one of those happy returns?”

We gave her our bedroom and I took my brother up to my study and turned down the covers on the brass bed. “She scared me tonight,” he said.

“She was a little rough with you,” I said. “Probably she’s just tired. I know she’s been stressing about turning seventy.”

“No, that thing about the Devil. That doesn’t just pop into a person’s mind.”

“Come on, she was joking .”

He shook his head. “There was something going on. I could feel it in the room.”

“Please don’t get weird with me.” I remembered that my husband had said something about an exorcism. “I’m sorry, I know you believe what you believe.”

“You felt it too,” he said. “Don’t lie.”

“What I felt ,” I said, “was that you and Mom were doing your usual. You were probably scaring her .”

“What, with big bad Jesus? Somebody got scared when I was about to pray. That wasn’t, like, even her voice.”

“God, you seriously think this.”

“We need to pray.” He went down on his knees and tried to pull me down with him.

I jerked my hand away. “I can’t watch this. It’s like seeing you shoot up. I’m going to bed.”

Down in the basement, I washed my face, brushed my teeth and went in to my husband. He looked up from his book. “You were right,” he said. “It’s perfectly tolerable down here. I have now officially stopped feeling sorry for any of our houseguests.”

I sat down on the bed; he put a hand on my back and began to stroke up and down. “He’s completely insane,” I said.

“He is a curiosity. I suppose he’s normal enough out there in America. Well, I’ll have an opportunity for further study when I drive him back to the airport.”

“I think he’s terrified all the time.”

“I thought you said he was insane. You need to make up your mind.”

After he went to sleep, I lay there and prayed that if something evil had entered the house, we would be delivered from it—and wasn’t that what the Lord’s Prayer said? I might as well have stayed up there and got down on my knees with my crazy brother. My pillbox of buds was in the room where he was staying; I prayed that he might go through my desk and discover it, as if that were how the evil had gotten in. I prayed for the sound of a toilet flushing. I heard only the lowing and the clattering of a train passing through, down along the river.

—

Oh my —that was a little gothic-y. Let’s get a grip before we have my mother sucking cocks in hell.

—

She stayed for another couple of days, I assume so she wouldn’t have to ride back with my brother. For much of the trip to LaGuardia, he and my husband had apparently chatted about the best cars to drive in those Colorado winters and his job at CompUSA, steering clear of Jesus and the war. “He says in ten years we’re all going to be walking around with computer chips in our foreheads,” my husband told me. “He seems a little conflicted about it, working where he does—as am I. When the Antichrist gets here, I want that young man on my team.” My mother and I went to hear his trio play at the restaurant, and she pleased him by requesting “I’ve Got the World on a String.” “Why don’t you come up and sing it?” he said. “What’s your key?” “Good lord, no,” she said. “I can’t sing a note.” He persisted—the place was practically empty, she was among friends—and she finally got up and proved it. She came back to the table blushing like a proud little girl. She still talks about it.

After my brother scared me about the Devil—all right, after I scared myself—I put the buds away in the freezer, inside a box of frozen green beans I’d bought for just this purpose. Hardly food that would tempt a hungry hubby. Now I looked forward to that drink when I got home from work, but I have to confess I’d begun to enjoy my job. I must have been the first managing editor to get Samuel Beckett into The Pennypincher —“What goes by the name of love is banishment, with now and then a postcard from the homeland”—or to pass along, thanks to my old researcher skills, the Fun Fact that when a hydrogen bomb explodes, it momentarily creates every element in the universe. I was sure the publisher would freak out, but I don’t suppose he ever read the filler—who did? I understood that The Pennypincher’ s new edgy sensibility wasn’t a triumph I could share with my husband, but I was so lost at this point that I felt sorry for myself about it.

In June I drove over for Andrea’s wedding, without the huz, who had a wedding of his own that afternoon, playing cocktail music until the real band started up; he said he couldn’t in good conscience deny the boys a chance to make two-fifty apiece—read that as you will. Andrea, I saw, had lost some weight, and the groom—an only-once-divorced theater publicist, with an eight-year-old son as his best man—had just a little gray hair at the temples. Lightly worn, Andrea called him. “I’m sorry your husband couldn’t make it,” he told me. “An architect and a musician. He must be very creative. And you’re a writer.”