Charles Baxter - There's Something I Want You to Do

But what I’m saying is that Jesus intervened with me. He came to me one night and said, in that loving way He has, “Dolores, what good would it do if you murdered that foolish woman? It would do you and the world no good at all. It wouldn’t bring Mike back. Turn that cheek,” He said to me as I was praying, and of course I could see He was right. So I forgave that woman, or tried to. On my knees, I turned the other cheek as I wept. I turned it back and forth.

I believe that humanity is divided into two camps: those who have killed others, or can imagine themselves doing so; and those for whom the act and the thought are inconceivable. Looking at me, you would probably not think me capable of murder, but I found that black coal in my soul, and it burned fiercely. I loved having it there.

All my life, I worked as a librarian in the uptown branch. A librarian with the heart of a murderer! No one guessed.

—

Months after Mike’s death, I’d go into Wesley’s room to tuck him in at night. By then he was talking. “Where’s Daddy?” he would ask me. Gone to heaven, I’d tell him, and he’d ask, “Where’s that?” and I wanted to say, “Right here,” but such an answer would be confusing to a child, so I just hummed a little tune, a lullaby to calm him. But my son knew there was something wrong with my face in those days, because of the hard labor of my grief. I didn’t smile when I put my son to bed, and probably I didn’t smile in the morning, either. I couldn’t smile on my own. So there, at night, in his bed, he would get out from under the sheet, stand up in his rocket-ship-pattern pajamas, and he would raise his hand with his two fingers, the index finger and the middle finger outstretched in a V-for-victory sign. He would raise those fingers to the sides of my mouth, lifting them up, trying to get me to smile. He held his fingers there until I agreed to look cheerful for his sake. He was only a little boy, after all.

—

Time passes. The socialite, as I said, is out of jail, and Wesley has grown up and has two children of his own, my dear grandchildren, Jeremy and Lucy. Corinne gave birth to Jeremy before she fled the marriage, and Astrid, Wesley’s second wife, gave birth to Lucy. But I still think of that woman, that socialite, driving away from my dying husband, and of what was going through her head, and what I’ve decided is that (1) she couldn’t take responsibility for her actions, and (2) if she did, she would lose the blue Mercedes, and the big house in the suburbs, and the Royal Copenhagen china, and the Waterford crystal, and the swimming pool in back, and the health club membership, and the closet full of Manolo Blahnik shoes. All the money in the bank, boiling with possibility, she’d lose all that, and the equities upping and downing on the stock exchange. How she was invested! How she must have loved her things, as we all do. God has a name for this love: avarice. We Americans are running a laboratory for it, and we are the mice and rats, being tested, to see how much of it we can stand.

God’s son despised riches. His contempt for riches sprouts everywhere in the Gospels. He believed that riches were distractions. Listen to Jesus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If that isn’t wisdom, I don’t know what is. And remember this, about those who are cursed? “For I was hungry, and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me.”

Anyway, that’s why Corinne is here. We have to feed and clothe her. Jesus doesn’t believe in those glittering objects that hypnotize you. Hypnotized, you drive away from a dying man stretched out bleeding on the pavement.

—

I go into Corinne’s room. She sits near the window with sunlight streaming in on her hair, which looks greasy, and she’s talking before she even sees me. Apparently she’s psychic and knows I’m coming. Since I’m not about to waste a beautiful morning like this one by brooding about breast cancer, I ask her, “Do you want to take a walk?” The question interrupts her monologue. “I’ve got to exercise these old bones,” I tell her. Actually, I’m not that old. I’m in my seventies. It’s just an expression.

She’s gesticulating and carrying on a private conversation and seems to be very busy. Finally she says, “No, I don’t think so.”

“My joints hurt,” I tell her. “I need some fresh air. And I need company.” Craftily, I say to her, “Without a companion, I might fall down. I might not get back up. You never know.”

“Oh, all right,” she says, her nursing instinct rising to one of her many surfaces. Even crazy people want to help out. “Oh all right all right all right.” She puts on a pair of tennis shoes that Wesley bought for her yesterday, and we set out into the residential Minneapolis autumn, with me slightly ahead of her so that I don’t have to smell her. Has she forgotten how to bathe? She’s had opportunities here, bathtubs, showers, and soap — running water, both hot and cold. We amble down toward Lake Calhoun. Out on the blue waters of the lake, some brave fellow has one of those sailboard things and is streaking across the surface like a human water bug. Here onshore, the wind agitates the fallen leaves, whipping them around. It’s October. My hips are giving me trouble today, and of course the lump in my right breast still remains there, patiently hatching.

“Do you think of the past?” she asks me. “I do. I wanted to call you on the telephone, you know,” Corinne tells me, suddenly lucid, “once I moved away, after Jeremy was born. All those years ago. But I couldn’t. I was a mess. I was ashamed of myself. I’m a heap of sorry.”

“Oh, I didn’t mind,” I say, before I realize that she might misunderstand me. “We thought you were in a state.” Then she tells me that she suffered panic attacks as a young mom — did I remember this? Of course I did — and that all she could do was escape from here, from the marriage and the child and the house. It’s her old story. She repeats it all the time. Contrition is a habit with her now.

“Nature tricked me,” she says. “I gave birth to a baby boy, and I didn’t love him, and I was so ashamed of myself that I left town. I went to work in Tulsa in an emergency room,” she says, knowing I know all this, “and I worked there for years, and the people came in night after night, and, Dolores, you can’t imagine these poor people, knifed and shot and slashed and choked. Their hands were broken and their mouths were bloody and bullet holes pierced them, and some of them had been poisoned, and the rest of them were bent over and groaning, and you know what happened then?”

“You forgave yourself?” I ask. I wish she would change the topic. I wish she wouldn’t dwell on any of this. She doesn’t know I’m capable of murder.

“No. I lived with it. I saw things. I heard things. I got bloodied with the blood of strangers all over me. People screamed right into my face from pain and confusion. I saw a woman whose boyfriend had forced her mouth open and made her swallow poison. A person shouldn’t see such terribleness. Her stomach had started to burn away before we got to her. When the police questioned the boyfriend, he said that she had told him to go fuck himself and that no woman was going to speak to him that way without consequences. So he did what he did. A manly thing to do. He had her name tattooed on his arm. With a heart! She survived that time, somehow. Two months later he killed her with a knife while she was sleeping. At least he was done away with in prison, later on, stabbed in turn. I think they call that karma. Thank goodness!”

By now we have made our way to Thirty-Sixth and to the fence surrounding the cemetery, whereupon Corinne loses her train of thought, as she does in all the subsequent walks we take together. When she collects her thoughts, she says, out of nowhere, “I hate them.”