Ann Patchett - Commonwealth

The children didn’t want to stay with Bert’s parents either. They had been much happier at the Pinecone, where they had stayed in summers past. At Bert’s parents’ house they had to take their shoes off at the back door and wipe their feet with a towel. Because they weren’t allowed in the living room under any circumstances, they had inevitably made a game out of dashing through at top speed on dares whenever they heard someone coming down the hall. A porcelain figurine of an English gentleman and his wolfhound was knocked from an end table and smashed.

Bert’s parents didn’t want them there. They had made the offer of this extended and highly unusual visit in hopes of seeing their son, not his children or his second wife or her children. But then Bert left.

Ernestine didn’t want them there. She couldn’t have. It meant eight extra mouths to feed (seven after Bert decamped), piles of laundry, games to invent, fights to break up, employers to soothe. The load fell heaviest on Ernestine’s shoulders and yet she alone carried her burden without complaint.

Bert went back to Arlington because under the circumstances of a normal work week it was expensive, impractical, and stimulatingly dangerous to find a place to continue his affair with his paralegal. Linda Dale (two first names; she did not answer to Linda) said for once she would like to have dinner together in a restaurant like regular people, go to bed in a real bed, wake up in the middle of the night and make love while they were still half asleep, and then do it again in the shower the next morning. Bert was not crazy about Linda Dale, she was petulant and demanding and very young, but she talked like this on the phone when he called the office, so what was he supposed to do? Stay at the farm?

He was in the office when his mother called to tell him about Cal. He jumped in his car and broke every speed limit, making the two-hour drive to the hospital in Charlottesville in just under one and a half like any parent would do. There wasn’t time to go home and straighten up the house. He never thought of it.

Sometimes it was hard for Beverly and Bert to remember what had destroyed them. When Beverly wept over the affair, the unfamiliar red panties surfacing in her unmade bed, Bert was aghast. The death of a child trumped infidelity. The death of a child trumped everything. It was a logic Beverly could nearly embrace. If pain and loss could be ranked then surely Bert had won and this was the time for them to pull together, for the sake of their marriage, or their remaining children. But accepting the circumstances didn’t turn out to be the same as forgiveness. They bound themselves together with a little tape and soldiered on, and even though their marriage held for nearly six years after Cal’s death, neither of them would remember it that way. They would say that their separate griefs had broken them apart much earlier.

If the end of Beverly and Bert’s marriage could not rightfully be attributed to Cal, neither could it be pinned on Albie, though the couple’s emotional resources were so depleted by the time Albie arrived from California that he didn’t have to do much of anything but watch them go over the cliff. The mere fact that he had come turned out to be enough. Five years, two months, and twenty-seven days after Cal died, Albie had dropped a lit book of matches in the trash can of the art room of Shery High, in Torrance. Teresa called Bert and told him about the fire, told him through her exhausted tears that Albie was being held in Juvenile. Bert hung up and had Beverly call her ex-husband to get the kid out. With that behind them, Bert called Teresa back to tell her what an incompetent parent she was. Saturday morning and she didn’t even know where their only son had gone to on his bike? He told her the home she provided was unfit, unsafe, and she had no choice but to send Albie to him. Bert had this conversation on the phone in the kitchen where Beverly was sautéeing onions to start a Stroganoff for dinner. She turned off the fire beneath the pan and walked slowly up the stairs to Caroline’s bedroom. She often hid in Caroline’s room now that her older daughter had gone to college. Bert never thought to look for her there.

Of course there were many things Teresa could have volleyed back, but at the heart of her ex-husband’s bombastic cruelty was one simple truth: she couldn’t keep Albie safe. She didn’t necessarily think Bert could do it either, but different friends, a different school, the other side of the country, might afford Albie a better chance. On Monday morning the principal called to say that Albie and the other boys were suspended pending investigation, and if the investigation found them guilty (which was likely considering they had been seen running out of the burning building on a Saturday morning and had confessed to starting the fire) they would be expelled. On Tuesday she called Bert back. She was putting Albie on a plane.

Albie, nearly fifteen, walked as far as the back patio, dropped his suitcase, sat down in a white wrought-iron chair, and lit a cigarette. His father was still trying to wrestle the giant sheets of cardboard that had been taped together to form a sort of box around the bicycle from the back of the station wagon. Bert had already told him on the ride in from Dulles that Beverly wouldn’t be home for dinner tonight. On Thursday nights Beverly took a French class at the community college and after that went to dinner with her school friends where they practiced conversational French. “She’s trying to find herself,” his father said, and Albie looked out the window.

“How is he getting home from the airport then?” Bert had asked her when Beverly announced she wasn’t going to be there. He walked right into that one.

When he got the bike unwrapped, Bert wheeled it out of the garage like it was Christmas morning. He had meant to say, Look at this! Good as new! but instead he saw the pack of cigarettes and, more distressingly, the red Bic lighter sitting on the table in front of his son. The bike didn’t seem to have a kickstand so he leaned it against one of the patio chairs.

“You aren’t allowed to have a lighter,” Bert said, though it came out as more of a question than he’d meant it to.

Albie looked at him, puzzled. “Why not?”

“Because you burned down your goddamn school. Are you telling me your mother didn’t ground you from fire?”

Albie smiled at the sheer expansiveness of his father’s stupidity. “I didn’t burn down the school. I set a fire in the art room. It was an accident, and they needed a new art room. The school is already open again.”

“I’ll say it then: You’re grounded from fire. That means no arson and no cigarettes.”

Albie took a long draw on his cigarette. He turned his head respectfully and blew the smoke to the side. He was respectfully smoking the cigarette outside the house in the first place. “Fire is an element. It’s like water or air.”

“So you’re grounded from an element.”

“Can I use the gas stove?”

They were both looking at the lighter on the table. When Bert reached down to take it Albie swept it into his hand, looking right at him. That was the moment: either Bert would hit his son or he would not. Albie held his cigarette down and lifted his face, eyes wide open. Bert straightened up, stepped back. He had never hit his children. He would not hit them now. The few times he’d ever smacked Cal played in his daydreams on a continuous loop.

“Don’t smoke in the house,” Bert said, and went inside.

Albie stared up at the house. It was not the one he’d come to as a child. It wasn’t any house he’d ever seen before. At some point between the last time he was in Virginia and now, Bert and Beverly had moved and failed to mention that fact to Holly or Albie or Jeanette. And why should they, when no one thought that Holly or Albie or Jeanette would ever visit again? But his father hadn’t mentioned the new house at the airport either. Did he forget? Did he think Albie wouldn’t notice? This place was bloodred brick with fluted white columns in the front, a junior relation of the house his grandparents lived in outside Charlottesville. It was heavily landscaped with plants and trees he didn’t recognize, everything orderly and neat. He could see the edge of a swimming pool already covered in tarp for the winter. He could look in the window from the patio and see the kitchen, see the fancy copper pots that hung from a rack on the ceiling, but if he got up and opened the door and walked through the kitchen, he wouldn’t know which way he was supposed to turn. He wouldn’t know what bedroom he was supposed to sleep in.