Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool

“Hey,” Sully said to Vera’s father, who opened his eyes in response to this sound that was not television. “Wake up. You’ve got company.”

The old man blinked, focused. “Sully,” he said, sitting up straighter, having slumped down during his nap.

“How are you, Mr. Mayor?” Sully said. Vera’s father had run for mayor as a Democrat forty-some years ago and suffered the fate of all Democrats seeking elected office in Bath, only worse, suffering the worst defeat in memory. In Bath, where mayor was a part-time office and mayoral candidates tended to be the owners of automobile dealerships, the real contest was always the Republican primary. Once that was settled, the actual election was pretty much a foregone conclusion, the Democratic candidates leaning decidedly in the direction of masochism or, in Robert Halsey’s case, fatalism. He had run on an educational platform and had been rejected so overwhelmingly that no one had dared bring up the subject of education in a local campaign ever since.

“What’s the score here?” Sully asked.

“I don’t know,” Robert Halsey confessed.

“They told me you were in charge here,” Sully said.

“I am,” the old man admitted. “Dallas was ahead when I fell asleep.”

“They still are,” Sully said. “Twenty to fourteen in case anybody asks you.”

“Where are they?” Vera’s father wondered, looking around the room.

“I think they saw me coming and ran for it,” Sully said.

Mr. Halsey smiled. “And left me behind.”

“It’s the law of the jungle, Mr. Mayor,” Sully said. “You feeling pretty well these days?”

“Not too bad,” the old man wheezed. “It’s a struggle I won’t be sad to give up.”

“Not much fun anymore?”

“It’s no fun anymore.”

“Well,” Sully said. “Just don’t let your daughter hear you say that. You may think things can’t get any worse, but they can.”

“How’s my old friend Mrs. Peoples?” Robert Halsey wondered. Miss Beryl had been one of the few ardent supporters of his doomed mayoral campaign.

“Just the same,” Sully assured him. “She hasn’t changed in twenty years.”

“What makes people unhappy, do you suppose?” Robert Halsey wondered out loud, confusing Sully, who thought at first that they were still on the subject of his landlady, then realized that the old man was thinking about his daughter, who hadn’t changed in twenty years either.

“I don’t know,” Sully confessed.

“It’s either their own fault or it’s ours,” Robert Halsey said, as if he were a long way from deciding. They watched the game for a while. “It’s the trouble with getting old and sick,” he said when Sully’d just about concluded their conversation was over. “There isn’t much to do but think.”

Since there didn’t seem to be much to say in response to this, Sully didn’t offer anything, and the next time he looked over at Robert Halsey, the old man was asleep again.

In the bathroom the boys were fighting as they undressed to prepare for their baths. When Peter opened the door to check on them, he caught Wacker, hand raised ready to do something, and Will, the older and larger boy, flinching and pulling away. Wacker looked more inconvenienced than embarrassed to be caught in an act of aggression, Will only temporarily relieved. “Cut it out, Wacker,” Peter told the younger boy. “You aren’t funny.”

Will studied his brother to see if these instructions would take. He didn’t look too hopeful.

“Get undressed. Get in the bathtub. And don’t let it overflow or Grandma will skin you,” Peter said, another ineffectual warning, he realized. In fact, he thought he detected a sly smile cross Wacker’s lips.

“Where’s Mom?” Will said, looking worried. It was usually their mother who supervised baths.

Peter was studying the bathtub with dismay. The water had been on forever and it was only half full. The water pressure was bad almost everywhere in Bath but ridiculous in Ralph and Vera’s house, where you couldn’t even take a shower. You had to start the tub ten minutes before you planned to get in, and the temperature was almost impossible to gauge. Peter felt the water in the tub and turned on more hot on the theory that it would cool down before the boys got in. Bath. What a ridiculous name, Charlotte always maintained, for a town where you couldn’t take a decent one.

“Where’s Mom?” Will repeated. He would repeat questions patiently until you answered them.

“At the store,” Peter told him impatiently, wondering as he did so if the boys had overheard his and Charlotte’s quarrel before dinner. “She’ll be back in a few minutes. You’d better be finished with your baths too.”

Another sly smile from Wacker. Or what? he seemed to be saying.

Closing the door on them, Peter went quietly into the downstairs bedroom, the den really, that he and Charlotte used when they visited, while the boys were given the room upstairs that had been his when he was a boy. The bed had been folded back into the couch, which meant that his mother had been in and done it. Kicking his shoes off, he lay down on the sofa and stared at the ceiling. In truth, he had no idea where Charlotte had gone.

When Andy snorted loudly in his playpen, Peter raised up on one elbow to study him, but the baby had not woken up and so Peter lay back down. Before making the trip, he and Charlotte had agreed to separate after the holidays, an eventuality he was looking forward to with mixed feelings. Liberation was what he’d expected to feel, but having reached this agreement with Charlotte, his spirits had declined. The fact that Charlotte was leaving him and not the other way around was not the comfort he’d imagined it would be, and as he lay in the den of the house he’d grown up in, he wondered whether it was a husband he wasn’t cut out to be, or a father. Or both. He wasn’t, in all honesty, much good at either. In the living room last week Will, who was prone to introspection, had been watching TV and picking his nose thoughtfully when he extracted a booger, the size of which had amazed and startled him. Since it was not, however, the sort of thing he could share with his parents, he simply sat there in the middle of the floor and stared at his finger, full of pride, unaware that Wacker was sneaking up behind him. When Wacker snatched the booger and ran off with it, Will, outraged, gave chase, screaming, “Mine! Mine!”

When the dispute erupted, Peter had been working in his cramped study, the utility room actually, which he shared with Charlotte’s washer and dryer, trying to finish an article he already knew no one would publish. Even when he finally discovered that this particular dispute was over ownership of a booger, his parental options seemed equally absurd. Possible responses ran through his mind, one after the other. He might, for instance, address the fairness principle. (“Wacker, give your brother back his booger. Get your own booger from your own nose.”) Or he could ignore the booger entirely. (“I thought I told you boys to be quiet so Daddy could work.”) Or even appeal to the older boy’s reason. (“Will, for heaven’s sake, you can’t really want that. Let the little jerk have it.”) In the end he’d said nothing, opting instead to collect his materials and retreat to the university library where there’d be peace and quiet. On the way out the door, he told Charlotte it was no great surprise he hadn’t gotten his tenure and promotion. People who lived in insane asylums never got tenure.

And then after dropping this guilt bomb, he hadn’t even gone to the library, but rather to the house of a young woman colleague whose lover he’d been since September. Her tiny house was in a rundown section of town consisting of, for the most part, large old houses subdivided by their slumlord owners into rental units. It was as if, Peter sometimes thought, someone had announced a contest to see how many Malaysian students could be crammed into a five-bedroom house. Deirdre’s place was actually a guesthouse out back of one of these Malaysian dorms, and each time Peter made his way along the narrow, roller-coaster sidewalk, he took a deep breath, as if to acknowledge that it would be the last pure air he’d breathe for a while.