“Tell him to call me,” Saul said. “Tell Howie to drop us a line and give us his address. Tell him we’re alive and he’s Uncle Howie now, and his niece would like a nice present from him.”
“I certainly won’t say that. Such a shame,” Delia said mournfully, “that you two don’t get along.”
“Oh, they get along,” Patsy said. “We just don’t hear much from him. By the way,” she said, sitting up, “who was that character in comic books who made money no matter what he did?” Patsy stood up and swayed back and forth for Mary Esther’s sake. Saul noticed that Patsy had circles under her eyes, a recent detail — a fact — about her that had escaped him. His heart surged like a motor racing, revving up its RPMs, all for her sake. “Money fell out of trees for him. Some duck. Some relative of Donald Duck.”
“Gladstone Gander,” Saul said, suppressing a belch. On the subject of comic books, books generally, baseball, music, philosophy, and movies, Saul was Mr. Memory.
“Oh, let’s go outside,” Delia said, staring at Saul’s beer bottle. “For just a moment. For a breath of air. All right, kids? What do you say? It’s getting stuffy in here.”
“It’s your perfume, Mom,” Saul said. “You’re wearing a gallon of it.”
“Not quite a gallon.” She smiled. “More like a half-gallon.” She stood up and strode briskly toward the back door, her bracelets and necklace jangling. Saul and Patsy heard the door slam behind her, and then her muffled voice, softly shouting, “It’s beautiful out here!”
“It can’t be beautiful,” Saul said. “It’s March.” He looked at Patsy. “It’s too cold to take the baby outside,” he said softly. “What is she thinking?” His eyes scanned his wife’s face. “When will we ever make love again, honey? Can you tell me that? I’m dying over here.”
Just then he heard his mother scream, a subtle scream, half-private. For a moment he thought it was because he had propositioned his wife. Collecting himself, Saul rushed out past the kitchen into the mud room, out through the back porch with its snow shovel, sand bucket, and bag of salt, onto the wood steps that descended unevenly to the back lawn, covered here and there with patches of dirty snow.
The air had cleared itself of clouds and overcast, and the moon was back in the sky. Just to the side of the steps, the Marschallin stood in the moonlight, her red hair looking silver gray, just as if she had aged thirty years within the past minute. Then Saul realized it was only the effect of the moonlight, and he said, “Mom, it’s just the moonlight. You’re not that old.”
She turned toward him, stricken. “What’re you talking about? What ever on earth are you talking about, Saul? Look!”
She pointed one of her long fingers, decorated with its red nail polish that in the moonlight also looked gray, and he followed where she indicated to the middle of the field, where the albino deer walked with a slight stagger, an arrow sticking out of its back leg, seemingly blinded and wounded now by Saul’s students, the pimply Cossacks. Still, the deer was alive, as it slowly faded back into the dark. Saul considered his options, all of them vague and transitory: he would have tried to run after it, that animal, somehow take its pain away, but for now he was not equipped with the necessary time and energy and speed for that particular kind of rescue.
Five
For the first two weeks after Mary Esther’s birth, Saul and Patsy’s neighbors and friends had called ahead, following country manners, before bringing over dishes of food. Day in and out, the food had accumulated on the kitchen counter and in the refrigerator: chicken-and-noodle casseroles and Jell-O salads and desserts, baked beans, and one poached salmon cooked by a fellow teacher at the school, a subscriber to Gourmet magazine and an avid watcher of the Food Network.
But Saul could be picky. “Well, it’s certainly not Jew food,” he had said after his friend Hugh Welch left. He picked up Hugh’s donated honey-baked ham before he pretended to pass it, like a football, through the kitchen window. “This is pig meat.”
“Don’t complain,” Patsy said. “You’re doing all this for effect. You like ham as much as I do, and you’re just going for cheap laughs.” She took the ham out of his hand and tried to stuff it into the refrigerator, where there was no room for it. “And I like Hugh, besides.”
“Listen, I’m fully assembled in America, but he’s doing this as an ethnic insult, and I’m not being paranoid. At least I don’t think so.”
“Oh, right. Honey,” she said, “calm down.” She turned around and gave him a square smile, beautiful and radiant but not without analytic substance. “You’re an imposter. I’ve seen you eat ham. Ham and sausage and bacon. You’re just playing to the galleries. I suppose next you’ll be keeping kosher. Besides,” she said, “these are gifts, Saul. I’d really appreciate it if you were grateful to your friends, because they’re my friends, too. Stop being a snob.”
“Sometimes they’re only your friends,” he said.
She gave him a long look. “And sometimes they’re only yours.”
“Okay. You want to divide them? Which ones are yours?” he asked. “Which ones aren’t? Let’s divide them up, Patsy, your friends and my friends, and let’s see who has more. The winner has more friends than the loser. The winner gets to go to the state fair for free.”
He stood near the table, balancing on one leg.
“Honey,” she said, “if you want to have a fight, we’ll fight about something actual when you’re ready to do that. And not until then. Actually, not a damn moment before that.”
They had gazed at each other carefully, as if they were entering a new landscape of embittered matrimony, one they had only heard about but never seen until now.
Harold, Saul’s barber, stared down into the crib and at Mary Esther while the meatloaf he had brought cooled under its tinfoil in the kitchen. With the gray March overcast behind her, Mrs. O’Neill, beaming fixedly on the front stoop with her expression of paralyzed charity, offered them a container of the ginger cookies that, despite her aging and memory loss, she could still remember how to make. She had packed the cookies inside a dusty uncleaned goldfish bowl. But she could still not remember the baby’s name after Saul and Patsy had told her three times, and before she left, she said music from somewhere still went through her head, Puccini and Mozart, but she could not remember whether the hour of the day was morning or afternoon, and she was going to have to move herself into a place where there were nurses and people who helped you eat dinner and told you the time. She would not be able to sing arias from opera, once there; she was sure of that. Emory and Anne McPhee gave Patsy a gallon of homemade potato salad preserved in Tupperware; Anne was pregnant again, she said, and couldn’t stay. Harry and Lucia Edmonds, who had worked with Patsy at the bank, brought over a pair of pink baby pajamas, complete with footies, that Lucia had bought at the new outlet mall. Gary Krochock, their neighbor and their insurance agent, also Jewish, dropped off a box of cigars. Mad Dog Bettermine, who had left his girlfriend at home because, he told Saul over the phone, he didn’t want her to get any big ideas about babies and his own potential for fatherhood, grew unexpectedly abashed at the sight of Mary Esther. Having hauled a case of discount no-name beer onto the front porch, he stood quietly over the crib, wordless from baby-fear, staring at Mary Esther, and he could not move until Patsy picked up Mary Esther and Saul took Mad Dog by the arm and guided him out of the room.