“Your mission is to get out of the Midwest, Saul, before something here balls up its fist and hits you. Come out to the Bay Area. We’ll go into business together.”
“Well,” Saul said, “I’m going to bed. See you in the morning, maybe.”
“I made up the guest room,” Patsy told Howie, yawning. “Uh, Howie, could you tell me one thing, before you go to bed?”
“What’s that?”
“Well, Saul told me when we were upstairs that you were going to give us some money.”
“I already have given you some money. Well, not money, but equities. That is, I’ve bought some stocks and put them in Saul’s name. You’re my family, you see. Anyone would do this. And I thought it was time to spread the wealth around. There’s money to spare. I won’t miss it.”
“How much is this?”
“About two million dollars,” Howie said. “But it’s not in blue chips. They’re kind of risky little companies, what I bought you. Lots of marginal enterprises. Techno stocks, things like that, e-commerce stuff. That’s how I. . well, never mind. The thing is, you shouldn’t sell them. You should hold on to them for years. If you sell them, you’ll be sorry. You can just go on right here with your lit — your life now as it is. Pretend all this money doesn’t exist.”
“You’re kidding! We can’t take this!” Patsy said. “You have to be joking! You can’t give us two million dollars! You can’t. That’s crazy. We’ll be ruined.”
“Yes, I can,” he said, heading toward the stairs, his hand already on the newel post.
“I’m not taking any of this. . largesse,” Patsy said. “I’m giving it all back to you.”
“Actually,” Howie said, just before he turned around, “the stocks are already in Saul’s name. If you want to give them away, it’s his decision, to tell you the honest truth.”
“What would we do with two million dollars?” Patsy cried out in agony.
“Anything you want.”
In the middle of the sleepless night (to her surprise and dismay, Saul had fallen asleep immediately — a very aggressive thing for him to have done), on one of her several trips to the bathroom to pee, Patsy heard a spattering sound like that of a bird flying into a window, and then another: two impacts. Whack — pause — wham. They came from downstairs, and Patsy could feel the hair on the back of her neck stand up. One blow was an accident; but two were deliberate. Two meant intention and human volition. Two meant harm.
The floor, as she ran down to the living room, felt unclean and unwelcoming to her bare feet, no longer hers, provisionaclass="underline" the carpeting was gritty and the wood slats squeaked. In the living room Patsy stood in darkness, studying the front window, where two egg yolks and the raw white of the egg surrounding them dribbled down the glass windowpane. Far in the distance she saw the white bleached albino hairs as the Himmel-perpetrators disappeared into the night.
So it had started. Somewhere, out there in the dark, someone had thrown two raw eggs at the house, and then, in all probability, had run off, sick with laughter or righteousness. Gordy, with his visits, was gone physically but now his substitutes were doing their methodical retributive work. Perhaps there would be escalation: rotten tomatoes, toilet paper, followed by firecrackers, then arson, then, finally, gunshots. Or painted swastikas. Of the punishing of good deeds there would be no discernible end. All at once the idea of owning a handgun made perfect sense to her. Staring out through the window, she crossed her arms over her chest. But she didn’t feel like herself; her body was always surprising her nowadays. Her breasts were so big, she still wasn’t used to them. Her feet were swollen, and her arms were getting thick and muscular.
Her mouth had gone instantly dry and she could hear what remained of her saliva as she swallowed.
It wasn’t her own safety she worried about so much as that of her children. Emmy and Theo didn’t deserve encirclement, to be brought up as the stigmatized children of God’s outcasts, or, even worse, as the children of millionaires.
When she returned to the upstairs hallway, Howie was standing there in his pajamas. Even in the dark he had an aura about him, attractive at the surface level but not quite to her taste at any particular depth. Getting up from bed, he would still be perfectly groomed, forever unmussed, his hair in order, his odors still concealed by soap and cologne. The stink of humanity was absent from him.
“What happened?” he whispered. He was studying her nightgown gnomishly, but in the dark there was precious little to see. “I heard something.”
“Weren’t you sleeping?”
“I never sleep,” he said, with a trace of pride. His face in the near-dark had a perfect symmetry, the eyes like gentle X-rays. Patsy noticed his chest and thought: Hmm, family resemblance.
“Well, we got egged.”
Mary Esther muttered quietly in her sleep from one room, and Saul groaned in his sleep from another. They were alike in that respect: they both vocalized in their dreams.
“You got what? Egged?” He leaned forward toward her.
“It’s complicated. The kids around here think we’re responsible for that boy, Gordy’s, suicide. They’ve formed a Gordy cult. It’s called Himmelism. Goth stuff. Come down and see for yourself,” she said. She took his hand and led him across the hallway toward the stairs, where she let go of him and reached out for the sticky bannister, grubby from child-and-baby productions.
On the first floor, she led him to the front room and showed him the egg yolks on the window.
“Ah,” Howie said, crossing his arms on his chest. “Golems.”
“What?”
“Golems. Jewish mythology from three or four centuries ago. They’re automatons made out of clay by rabbis. They’re created to be servants— but they always run amuck and the rabbi has to destroy them.” He gazed at the window. “So now I guess they’re running amuck. Did Saul make them in his spare time?”
“Nice theory,” Patsy said. “But I think these kids are all-Americans. How come you know about golems? That’s not Delia’s line. Or yours either.”
Howie shrugged. “Mom took Saul and me to the Jewish Cultural Center when we were kids. That’s about the only Jewish thing we ever did. And all I remember from those sessions were the myths and stories. The first time I saw the marching broomsticks in Fantasia, I thought: Yeah, golems.” He smiled at her in the dark.
“Hey,” she said, “let’s go into the kitchen. If you can’t sleep, and I can’t sleep, we might as well sit up together. Come on.” She inclined her head. “We’ll wait for the sun to come up if we have to.”
After they had arranged themselves in the lightless kitchen, Patsy on a chair near the refrigerator and Howie close enough to the counter so that he could lean his head against it, they sat drinking tap water from glasses Patsy had purchased, years ago, at the hardware store. They had no elegance; she liked the sense of commonality, of plain making-do, when she served drinks in these glasses to guests like Howie. If you were going to be elegant, the true note would have to come from somewhere else. The digital clocks on the stove and the microwave gave off sufficient illumination so that she could see where Howie was sitting, but she could not quite tell what expression was on his face, which suited her. There was an aspect to Howie that was not quite domesticated, that was unsafe, and dangerous to look upon. He could be oddly arousing.
“Tell me more about Emmy,” Howie asked, and Patsy was touched that he would ask about Emmy even if he might not be interested in children generally — single men usually weren’t — a curiosity evoked for the sake of the appearances that Howie spent so much of his time trying to keep up. “Tell me what she’s like,” he suggested companionably, though the request contained a hint of his business side, his wish to issue commands.