Commonwealth (35 page)

“The ghost of Christmas past,” he said when she stepped into his arms.

“I should have called you sooner,” Franny said. “It's all been sort of last-minute.”

Bert did not invite her in, nor did he let her go. He only stood
there holding Franny to his chest. Always she was the baby he had carried around Fix Keating's party, the most beautiful baby he had ever seen. “Last-minute works for me,” he said.

“Come on,” she said. “I'm freezing.”

Inside the door she took off her shoes.

“I made a fire in the den when you called. It hasn't really caught yet but it's starting.”

Franny remembered the first time she'd ever been inside this house. She must have been thirteen. The den was why they'd bought the place, the big stone hearth, the fireplace big enough for a witch's pot, the way the room looked out over the pool. She thought it was a palace then. Bert had no business keeping this house, it was entirely too big for one person. But on this night Franny was grateful he'd held on to it, if only so she could come home.

“Let me get you a drink,” he said.

“Maybe just some tea,” she said. “I'm driving.” She stood up on the hearth and flexed her stocking feet on the warm stones. She and Albie would come downstairs in the winter late at night when they were in high school and open up the flue when it was too cold to go outside and smoke. They would lean back into the fireplace with their cigarettes and blow the smoke up the chimney. They would drink Bert's gin and throw away the empty bottles in the kitchen trash with impunity. If either parent noticed the dwindling stock in the liquor cabinet or the way the empties were piling up, neither one of them ever mentioned it.

“Have a drink, Franny. It's Christmas.”

“It's December twenty-second. Why does everyone keep telling me it's Christmas?”

“Barmaid's gin and tonic.”

Franny looked at him. “Barmaid's,” she said sternly. Bert had
shown her that trick when she was a girl and would play bartender for their parties. If a guest was already drunk she should pour a glass of tonic and ice and then float a little gin on the top without mixing it up. The first sip would be too strong, Bert told her, and that's all that mattered. After the first sip drunks didn't pay attention.

“If you get sloppy you can sleep in your old room.”

“My mother would love that.” It was always a trick getting out to see Bert. For all the times that Beverly had forgiven him, she couldn't understand that Franny and Caroline might forgive him as well.

“How is your mother?” Bert asked. He handed Franny her drink, and the first sip—straight gin—was right on the money.

“My mother is exactly herself,” Franny said.

Bert pressed his lips together and nodded. “I would expect nothing less. I hear old Jack Dine is slipping though, that she's having a hard time taking care of him. I hate to think of her having to deal with that.”

“It's what we'll all have to deal with sooner or later.”

“Maybe I'll give her a call, just to see how she's doing.”

Oh, Bert, Franny thought. Let it go. “What about you?” she said. “How are you doing?”

Bert had made his own drink, a gin with a splash of tonic floating on the top to balance her out, and came to sit on the sofa. “I'm not so bad for an old man,” he said. “I still get around. If you'd called me tomorrow you would have missed me.”

Franny stabbed at the logs with the fireplace poker to encourage the flame. “Where are you going tomorrow?”

“Brooklyn,” he said. Franny turned around to look at him, poker in hand, and he smiled enormously. “Jeanette invited me for Christmas. There's a hotel two blocks from where they live. It's nice enough. I've been up there a couple of times to see them now.”

“That's really something,” Franny said, and she came to sit next to Bert on the couch. “I'm happy for you.”

“We've been doing better these last couple of years. I e-mail with Holly too. She says that I can come to Switzerland and see her in that place she lives, the commune. I keep telling her I'll meet her in Paris. I think that Paris is a good compromise. Everybody likes Paris. I took Teresa there for our honeymoon. That would have been what? Fifty-five years ago? I think it's time to go back.” He stopped himself then, remembering something. “You were out there, weren't you, when Teresa died? I think Jeanette told me that.”

“Caroline and I took her to the hospital. We were with Dad.”

“Well, that was nice of you.”

Franny shrugged. “I wasn't going to leave her.”

“How is your dad?”

Franny shook her head, thinking of her father.
How is old Bert?
Fix would always say. “I'd tell you he wasn't going to make it until New Year's but I'm sure I'd be wrong.”

“Your father's a tough guy.”

“My father's a tough guy,” Franny said, thinking of the gun in his bedside table and how she had declined to help him when he asked. She'd done worse than that. She'd taken the gun to the police department in Santa Monica later, turned it in along with the bullets.

“I'm going to float a little more gin in there,” Bert said.

“A tiny bit,” Franny said, and handed back the glass. She wasn't drunk and so she was sadly aware that all the gin was gone now.

“We're not even up to half a jigger yet.” Bert made his way to the bar at the side of the room.

“Just be careful.”

“I remember seeing your father again after your christening
party,” Bert said. “I saw him at the courthouse. I don't know, maybe I saw him all the time and never knew it before, but that Monday he came up to me and shook my hand, said he was glad I'd come. ‘Glad you could come to Franny's party,' is what he said.” He handed Franny her drink.

“It was a long time ago, Bert.”

“Still,” Bert said. “It bothers me to think of him now, so sick. I never had anything against your father.”

“Do you hear from Albie?” she said, wanting to change the subject. It was a question she could have asked Albie but for some reason she never did. They didn't talk about Bert. Even all those years ago when they'd lived together under this roof they didn't talk about him.

“Not so much. Every now and then one of us gives it a try but we haven't had a lot of success. Albie was very attached to his mother, you know. That's the way it happens—girls to their fathers and boys to their mothers. I don't think he ever got over my leaving his mother.” For Bert the past was always right there with him, and so he assumed that everyone else felt the same way.

“You should give him a call. It's a tough time of year now, with Teresa gone.” Franny thought of her own father, of this time next year.

“I'll call him on Christmas,” he said. “I'll call from Jeanette's.”

Franny wanted to tell him it was three hours earlier in California and that he could call his son tonight, could call him right now, but Bert wasn't going to call Albie and there was no sense trying to make him feel bad about it. She tilted back her glass and went past the gin for a second time. She pressed through the fizzy sweetness of the tonic and drained the glass down to the ice and the lime. “I wish I could stay,” Franny said, and part of her meant it. She would have liked to go upstairs to her room and lie down on her bed, though what were the chances that the bed was still there?

Bert nodded. “I know. I'm just glad you came by at all. I really appreciate that.”

“What time are you flying out?”

“Early,” he said. “That way I'll beat the traffic.”

Franny got up and gave her stepfather a hug. “Merry Christmas,” she said.

“Merry Christmas,” Bert said, and when he stepped back to look at her his eyes were damp. “Be careful now. If anything happened to you your mother would kill me.”

Franny smiled and gave him a kiss, thinking that Bert still saw the world in terms of what Beverly would and would not forgive him for. She stepped into her shoes beside the front door and let herself out into the snow. Inside the house Bert was turning off the lights, and she stood there on the front porch for a minute and watched the snow come to rest on the sleeves of her velvet dress. She was thinking about the night she couldn't find Albie. Bert was in his study downstairs working and her mother was in the kitchen going over her French homework. It was long past dinner. It was snowing just like this and the house was perfectly quiet. Franny was wondering where Albie was. Usually by this time he had come into her room to do his homework or talk to her instead of doing his homework. She was lying across her bed reading
The Return of the Native
for AP English. It wasn't that he came in every night, but if he wasn't in her room then she could usually hear him, watching television, walking around. She kept listening until finally she put the book down and went to look for him. He wasn't in his bedroom or the bathroom or the den or in the living room where he never went anyway. When she had looked everywhere in the house she could think of she went into the kitchen.

“Where's Albie?” Franny asked her mother.

Her mother shook her head and made a little sound that stood
in for the words
no idea.
Her mother never did learn to speak French.

“If you see him would you let me know?”

Her beautiful mother, maybe embarrassed now, looked up from her book for just a second and nodded. “Sure,” she said.

Franny didn't think of knocking on the door to Bert's study and asking him if he'd seen Albie, or checking to see if maybe Albie was in there with him. The thought never crossed her mind.

Instead, she went out the back door. She was still wearing her uniform from school: a plaid skirt and kneesocks, saddle oxfords, a sweatshirt from track over her white blouse. Her mother didn't tell her to put on a coat or ask her where she was going the way she would have had Franny walked out the back door on a snowy night a few years before. Her mother was lost in a sea of irregular verbs.

Franny looked in the garage but Albie wasn't in the garage. She walked a circle around the house and then went down the street, walking two houses down in one direction, three houses down in the other. She looked at the snow for bicycle tracks but there was nothing there, only her own footprints going in every direction. She was chilled now and her hair was getting wet. She was a little worried but only a little. She was thinking she could find him. She decided to go back to the house for her coat and as she was coming up the driveway she saw him, just a few inches of the side of his head behind the boxwoods beside the front door. He was wrapped in his red sleeping bag, staring up at the snow.

“Albie?” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Freezing,” Albie said.

“Well don't. Come inside.” She walked across the soft snow covering the lawn until she was standing right in front of him.

“I'm too high,” he said.

Around every streetlight, every porch light, there was a soft halo of snow. Everything else was dark. “No one's going to notice.”

“They will,” he said. “I'm really high.”

“You can't stay out here.” Franny was starting to shiver. She was wondering what she had been thinking of, going out without her coat.

“I can,” he said. His voice was so light, so airy, as if it were part of the snow.

Franny stepped between the boxwoods, thinking she would have to pull him up. Albie was taller than she was now but he was skinny, and anyway he wouldn't fight her. But as soon as she got back there with him she understood the appeal of this particular spot, the way you could see all things without being seen. The overhang of the roof kept them out of the snow for the most part. She could smell the pot on him now, sweet and strong. Franny and Albie drank together sometimes, and they smoked cigarettes, but they didn't smoke pot together. Later that would change.

“Let me in,” she said.

And just like that Albie raised up his arm, never taking his eyes off the snow, and she sat down beside him. The sleeping bag was filled with down and when they were wrapped up together it was remarkably warm. They sat there like that, their backs up against the brick of the house, the coarse hedge just in front of them. They watched the snow fall and fall and fall until they thought that they were the ones who were falling.

“I miss my mother,” Albie said. In the one year when they were very close it was the only time he said it, and he only said it that night because he was very high.

“I know,” Franny said, because she did know. She knew it exactly, and she pulled the sleeping bag tighter around them and they
stayed there together just like that until she lost the feeling in her feet and she told him they had to go inside.

“I lost the feeling in my feet a long time ago,” he said.

They put their arms around one another in order to stand. The front door was locked so they went down the driveway, dragging the sleeping bag behind them. Franny's mother wasn't in the kitchen anymore but the light was still on beneath the door to Bert's study.

“I told you no one would know if you were high,” Franny said, and for some reason this cracked Albie up. He sat down on the floor and pulled the sleeping bag over his head, laughing while Franny got out the cereal and the milk.

Franny brushed the snow off her shoulders and made her way to the rented SUV. She had never told that story to Leo. She had meant to but then for some reason she decided to hold it back. Now she understood that at some point far out in the future there would be a night just like tonight, and she would remember this story and know that no one else in the world knew it had happened except Albie. She had needed to keep something for herself.

About the Author

Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels and three non-fiction books. Both
The Magician's Assistant
and
State of Wonder
were shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, which she won with
Bel Canto
in 2002. She has won the PEN/Faulkner Award and been shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize, and her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She is the co-owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee.

ANNPATCHETT.COM