The house, which had once smelled of Saul and Patsy, and the sweet-sour loamy smells of parenting and babyhood, now smelled pungently of Delia’s perfume, a fragrance with the power of an air-raid siren. What was the point? Why did a new grandmother have to wear so much perfume? Well, Saul thought, the question answers itself. His mother had given birth to him when she was twenty-one. She was now in her forties, and still, she thought, a player.
Delia was tall, with brilliant red hair, and restless. Bracelets rang noisily on her wrists, and she favored large clumpy necklaces of amber. She had long elegant fingers tipped with brilliant blood-red nail polish. She had a dominatrix side, he thought uncharitably. Saul, who liked Richard Strauss’s operas and once played trombone in one of the Northwestern University student pit orchestras, sometimes referred to his mother as “the Marschallin” and thought that Eleanor Steber could do a good job of playing her. Moving around the house like a woman who meant business no matter what she was doing, she had missed her calling, Saul claimed in bed to Patsy. She should have been a full-time aristocrat running a palace, planning masked balls, arranging other people’s affairs. She aspired to a certain level of domesticated depravity. Just watching her tired him out and gave him headaches. Always tanned and fit, she had a personal trainer at a health club in Bethesda, and Saul was always dismayed by how good-looking his mother was, how disconcertingly sexy. No middle-aged woman needed to be that beautiful, he thought, especially when the beauty is fading just enough to give it warmth, and that woman is your mother, and your father has died young, and your mother has gone on to have a succession of boyfriends, and. . and. .
His mother took his hand. He wondered if he had a streak of misogyny. Probably only in regard to his mother. Other women did not inspire it.
“Emmy was a little angel today,” the Marschallin said, nodding toward the living room, where Mary Esther was sleeping in Patsy’s arms. Patsy raised her face toward Saul. “How was work?” his mother asked, keeping her voice down. “How was school?”
The question made him feel like a child. Delia had that effect on him. Saul removed his hand from his mother’s and pursed his lips in Patsy’s direction. He took out a handkerchief to wipe off his mother’s lipstick from his face. But he could feel its imprint there, worming its way through the skin toward his brain. “Work was fine. Someone left me a note. They said I was a kick.”
“That’s nice,” Delia said dubiously. “A kick? In what sense?”
“In the sense that. . oh, you know. A party. That’s a real kick. Fun.”
Very quietly, from her chair, Patsy said, “Nobody uses that word that way anymore.” Having gathered her blond hair back in a ponytail, she gazed down at Mary Esther and touched the baby’s own perfect feathery hair. Patsy’s beauty was fuller and more human, Saul thought, than his mother’s. It was actionable. You wanted to mate with her. His wife’s beauty made him happy and crazy, and his mother’s beauty just made him crazy, period. Maybe menopause would calm his mother down, but he doubted it.
“They don’t? Sure they do,” Saul said.
“Not in a learning-disabilities class, they don’t.” Patsy shook her head. “You can bet your bottom dollar that they don’t use expressions like that.”
“I agree with Patsy,” Delia announced with a huge smile. “We have womanly solidarity here.”
“Oh, I hope not,” Saul grumbled, suddenly thirsty for a beer. He wanted to escape from the room and Delia’s presence. There was too much femaleness around all of a sudden. He rushed to the refrigerator for a beer, then returned to the living room so that he could drink it from the bottle in front of his mother. He couldn’t wait until she was gone and Patsy’s relatives arrived. Her parents were sweet and generous and harmless, very fond of Saul. In contrast to his mother, they were not like wild animals in a zoo. He would trade his mother for his mother-in-law anytime. Saul’s mother sat down close to Patsy and threw a large radiant scary smile in her son’s direction.
“Your brother used to use that expression constantly,” she said. “‘Oh, that’s a kick,’ he’d say.” She examined her fingernails. “Your brother loved kicks.”
“Yes, he did,” Saul said. “And he still does.” He had not had a phone call or a letter from Howie in ages. It irked him, Howie’s indifference to Patsy and himself and to Mary Esther’s birth. What Howie did was give birth to money, money, and then more money. “Where is he? The last I heard he was rock climbing in Colorado or someplace.”
“Your handsome brother?” Delia sat up, stretching her long legs wrapped in designer jeans. Then she straightened, somehow displaying herself further, unnecessarily. More of her perfume seemed to seep into the air. It was making Saul light-headed, like pepper-spray. “Howie hasn’t called you? In how long? He promised me he would. Oh, he gave up the rock climbing for a few months. Got it out of his system, I guess. It’s all information technology now. Well, he always did have a head for math. Didn’t I tell you?” Delia looked at Saul as if his ignorance on this subject was his fault. “That friend of his, what’s his name, Gerald Somebody, has got him working in computers and things, some start-up company making programs for instant balance-sheet assessments. Or something digital.” Delia waved her hand abstractedly, conjuring up computers and whirring machinery. “High-speed information flow stuff. He said he’d call. Call you, I mean. I told him about Mary Esther. He seemed interested. I can’t believe Howie hasn’t called you to keep you informed.”
“That’s nice,” Saul said. “‘Interested’ is nice.” He took a swig of the beer. “I’m pleased about the ‘interested’ part.”
“Don’t be so ironical about your brother. He doesn’t have all the feelings about things that you have. He’s not so. .” She searched for the word. “Emotional. He sails along on the surfaces. That’s his gift. Besides, he’s making a lot of money,” Delia reported. “A lot of money, he says, almost by accident. Of course he’s immature, but that’s. . I wish you wouldn’t drink beer right out of the bottle, sweetheart. Not in the living room.” Saul’s mother made a distaste-expression. It reminded Saul of years of distaste-expressions, and he looked away, though it pleased him that she was annoyed.
On New Year’s Eve, he would make a resolution about not being petty with his mother, but not until then.
Saul and his younger brother had never been close. In Saul’s estimation, Howie’s brains and his good looks (he was painfully handsome, everyone said, beautiful, a male version of Delia), and Howie’s efforts to get some distance on their mother had made him simultaneously distant and arrogant, or distantly arrogant. In any case, he was hard to get close to, and his thoughts were often a mystery. Like many extraordinarily good-looking men, he never bothered saying very much. Other people were always trying to talk to him, to make the first move, desperate just to keep him around. Saul’s brother had deep brown eyes, a perfectly symmetrical face with high cheekbones, curly black hair, and perfectly straight posture. His princely appearance was perfect in a way that Saul found unpleasant. People stared at him helplessly. He never shambled anywhere, never had a hair out of place, any clothes looked good on him, and as a result he was always being given special attentions.
Howie had once called Saul, during the period of Saul’s life when Saul was driving a taxicab in Chicago, to report that two women had proposed marriage to him that very week. This was at Princeton, where Howie was a junior, majoring in math and computer science. Howie thought it was hilarious, all these propositions, all these women, and the men, too, who hung around him, and he thought that Saul would also be amused. Popularity was a stitch. He was a lucky guy, Howie was, starting with his looks and going on from there. In any particular room, if Howie had not slept with all of the women, it was just an oversight. Well, Howie played the part of the grasshopper, and Saul played the part of the ant. Except grasshoppers weren’t also supposed to be smart and to make a lot of money. Winter was supposed to come in due course and kill them dead.