Richard Russo - Everybody's Fool

Nothing troubled Gus more than this spooky phone business. These days the phone was her constant companion, her link to something as necessary as her next breath. Sometimes, when they were having a quiet meal, the phone would “ring,” and she’d rise, cross the room, take it out of her bag and “answer” it. She seemed to remember their long-standing rule about no calls during dinner, so she’d lower her voice and say, “I can’t talk now,” and return it to her bag. Other times she would listen patiently to whoever she dreamed was speaking, her eyes welling with tears. “Oh, dear,” she’d finally say, “then it’s even worse than we thought.” Sometimes he wondered if he himself was the subject. “He doesn’t know,” she’d whisper before pausing to listen for a while. “Of course he has a right to, but what if it destroys him?” Sometimes her conversations were so compelling that Gus would get caught up in them, half believing there really was someone on the line and wanting very much to know what the other person was saying. It was all so profoundly unsettling that he was considering taking the phone away from her.

At least the inevitable crisis might be drawing near, and the next few days could reveal where they were headed. Sometimes — who knew why? — Alice’s inner turbulence would calm, and she’d return to her easel, her brushes, her tranquil blues and greens and yellows, but it was far more likely that they were now on that all-too-familiar downward trajectory that would end in Utica, at the state mental hospital. It was the waiting he hated most. It was like attending a child with a fever, watching it climb dangerously, praying for it to break, fearing it wouldn’t, knowing you were helpless to affect the outcome.

All of which was why Gus had spent a sleepless night. He’d gone to bed early in hopes of putting a merciful end to the god-awful day, but his thoughts were on a loop. It still boggled his mind that one whole side of the old mill could have collapsed into the street. And on the same day a lethal reptile whose natural habitat is India escapes from the Morrison Arms? Nor was he able to dispel from his mind the image of his damn fool of a police chief pitching forward into Judge Flatt’s open grave, sending up that plume of dust. No doubt all three of these stories would be prominently featured in the Schuyler paper. Dear God, they’d have a field day! Every time it seemed he might drift off, another thunderstorm rolled through, and Gus was wide awake again. He was the one in need of a sedative. Why hadn’t he asked for one? When one pile-driving clap of thunder shook the house, he rose and went to check on Alice, but she appeared to be sleeping soundly. Nor did the ringing telephone wake her later.

The calls started shortly after the last of the storms, and they kept on throughout the night, mostly from citizens wanting to know when the fuck they were going to get their power back. The biggest mistake Gus had made in running for mayor — what on earth had possessed him? — was to make his home phone number public. The idea, as best he could recall, had been to come across as a genuine public servant, open and accessible to his constituents. It quickly became apparent, however, that most of the people who wanted to talk to him, especially in the middle of the night, were drunk or insane or both, so once he was safely elected he got an answering machine to screen the loonies and used his unlisted cell phone for people he actually wanted to talk to. His recorded message for everyone else stated that each call was important to him (a lie) and that he would return the call at his first opportunity (another). It stunned him how long people would vent. Several callers reported strange otherworldly sightings: cows in the fields with their twitching tails brightly aglow, or a mystical blue orb perched atop the bayonet of the Union soldier statue on the library lawn, or stone crosses ablaze at their points out at Hilldale. Was something satanic afoot? one caller wanted to know. Sophomoric, in Gus’s opinion, was more like it. With less than two weeks of school left, they’d entered prime prank season. If stone crosses were burning, it was because some nitwit had doused them in lighter fluid and set a match to them. In the morning he’d have Raymer check with the hospital to see how many teenagers had been treated for burns.

There were other less spectral goings-on as well. The mother of a man known around town as Spinmatics Joe called to say that her son had gone out to the White Horse Tavern and not come home, leading her to suspect foul play. She gave Gus to understand that some rabid liberals had it in for her boy because he dared to speak the truth about the minorities and homosexuals and them who were taking over everything to the point where you couldn’t really even call this America anymore. The final lunatic had called shortly after five to report grave robbers digging up Judge Barton Flatt’s grave. Though the idea was ludicrous, just in case, he’d called the station, and an officer named Miller was dispatched to investigate. He found nobody at the crime scene, but a hundred yards from the Spring Street entrance he came upon something even more bizarre and disturbing. An enormous section of earth large enough to accommodate a mature tree and its vast, shriveled root system, as well as half-a-dozen caskets, some of them very old, had somehow detached itself from its surroundings, slid down the slope made muddy by the torrential rains and now sat like an island in the middle of the goddamn road.

Which was why, when the mayor looked out his bedroom window and saw the sky lightening in the east, he gave up on sleep. Better to rise and meet the day head-on. Rather than wait for the Democrat to be delivered midmorning, he’d drive into Schuyler, grab a hot-off-the-press copy and take his inevitable shellacking over an expensive cappuccino at the new Starbucks everybody was talking about. Three-fifty seemed like a lot to pay for coffee, but he heard they had nice leather chairs, and he could sink into one of those to read the bad news about his town in relative peace among hipper Schuyler folks who saw nothing so terribly wrong with small extravagances. By the time he returned to Bath and his own unhip constituents, the bad news would feel comfortably old hat. He dressed quietly and was halfway out the door before it occurred to him to check on Alice one more time, and it was then he discovered she was gone.

—

POOR, KIND, addled woman.

Who was to blame? It would’ve been nice to blame Kurt, and most of the time Gus did. Other times, like now, he gauged his own complicity. He knew, of course, that Alice’s difficulties predated him, and maybe even Kurt, who claimed she’d been a feral young woman in college, her mind splintered from dropping acid, but Gus doubted Alice had ever been truly wild. She might have experimented with drugs — it was the seventies, after all — but only at someone else’s instigation, and he suspected Kurt of being her personal Svengali. What a piece of work that man had turned out to be. Hiring him — Gus himself had cast the deciding vote — had been a tragic mistake. To make matters worse, he’d been warned. Two of his search committee colleagues had sensed something wrong, something didn’t add up, but it wasn’t anything they could put their finger on, so Gus had reminded them that vague misgivings were sometimes just prejudice in disguise. He’d certainly looked good on paper. True, he hadn’t published much, but he was professionally active, attending numerous conferences and giving papers, and he appeared to know the biggest names in political science personally. His letters of recommendation were among the strongest Gus had ever seen.

One night, though, shortly after Kurt’s campus visit, Gus had gotten a call at home. “You do not want to hire Professor Wright,” the caller said without preamble. Gus’s first thought was that this must be one of his search committee colleagues, but it sounded like a long-distance call. When Gus said, “Who is this?” the man said that wasn’t important. What mattered was that he understand that Kurt Wright was evil. Gus remembered actually chuckling at this. Who in the academy used such language? There, words like “evil” had long ago been replaced by others like “inappropriate.” The caller, whoever he was, must be unhinged. “Well,” Gus told him, “yours seems to be a minority view. His letters of recommendation—”