The Corrections: A Novel (66 page)

“How high was his fever?”

“A hundred this morning.”

“A hundred is not a high fever!”

Gary sighed and looked away, tilting his head to align it with the axis of the listing Christmas tree. “Look,” he said. “Jonah’s disappointed. I’m disappointed. You’re disappointed. Can we leave it at that? We’re all disappointed.”

“It’s just that I’m all ready for him,” Enid said. “I made his favorite dinner—”

“I specifically warned you—”

“I got tickets for Waindell Park tonight!”

Gary shook his head and walked toward the kitchen. “So we’ll go to the park,” he said. “And then tomorrow Denise is here.”

“Chip too!”

Gary laughed. “What, from Lithuania?”

“He called this morning.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Gary said.

The world in the windows looked less real than Enid would have liked. The spotlight of sunshine coming in under the ceiling of cloud was the dream light of no familiar hour of the day. She had an intimation that the family she’d tried to bring together was no longer the family she remembered—that this Christmas would be nothing at all like the Christmases of old. But she was doing her best to adjust to the new reality. She was suddenly
very
excited that Chip was coming. And since Jonah’s wrapped gifts would now be going to Philadelphia with Gary, she needed to wrap some travel alarm clocks and pen-and-pencil sets for Caleb and Aaron to reduce the contrast in her giving. She could do this while she waited for Denise and Chip.

“I have so many cookies,” she told Gary, who was washing his hands fastidiously at the kitchen sink. “I have a pear that I can slice, and some of that dark coffee that you kids like.”

Gary sniffed her dish towel before he dried his hands with it.

Alfred began to bellow her name from upstairs.

“Uch, Gary,” she said, “he’s stuck in the tub again. You go help him. I won’t do it anymore.”

Gary dried his hands extremely thoroughly. “Why isn’t he using the shower like we talked about?”

“He says he likes to sit down.”

“Well, tough luck,” Gary said. “This is a man whose gospel is taking responsibility for yourself.”

Alfred bellowed her name again.

“Go, Gary, help him,” she said.

Gary, with ominous calm, smoothed and straightened the folded dish towel on its rack. “Here are the ground rules, Mother,” he said in the courtroom voice. “Are you listening? These are the ground rules. For the next three days, I will do anything you want me to do, except deal with Dad in situations he shouldn’t be in. If he wants to climb a ladder and fall off, I’m going to let him lie on the ground. If he bleeds to death, he bleeds to death. If he can’t get out of the bathtub without my help, he’ll be spending Christmas in the bathtub. Have I made myself clear? Apart from that, I will do anything you want me to do. And then, on Christmas morning, you and he and I are going to sit down and have a talk—”

“
ENID
.” Alfred’s voice was amazingly loud. “
SOME
BODY’S AT THE DOOR!
”

Enid sighed heavily and went to the bottom of the stairs. “Al, it’s
Gary
.”

“Can you help me?” came the cry.

“Gary, go see what he wants.”

Gary stood in the dining room with folded arms. “Did I not make my ground rules clear?”

Enid was remembering things about her elder son which she liked to forget when he wasn’t around. She climbed the stairs slowly, trying to work a knot of pain out of her hip.

“Al,” she said, entering the bathroom, “I can’t help you out of the tub, you have to figure that out yourself.”

He was sitting in two inches of water with his arm extended and his fingers fluttering. “Get that,” he said.

“Get what?”

“That bottle.”

His bottle of Snowy Mane hair-whitening shampoo had fallen to the floor behind him. Enid knelt carefully on the bath mat, favoring her hip, and put the bottle in his hands. He massaged it vaguely, as though seeking purchase or struggling to remember how to open it. His legs were hairless, his hands spotted, but his shoulders were still strong.

“I’ll be damned,” he said, grinning at the bottle.

Whatever heat the water had begun with had dissipated in the December-cool room. There was a smell of Dial soap and, more faintly, old age. Enid had knelt in this exact spot thousands of times to wash her children’s hair and rinse their heads with hot water from a 1½-quart saucepan that she brought up from the kitchen for that purpose. She watched her husband turn the shampoo bottle over in his hands.

“Oh, Al,” she said, “what are we going to do?”

“Help me with this.”

“All right. I’ll help you.”

The doorbell rang.

“There it is again.”

“Gary,” Enid called, “see who that is.” She squeezed shampoo into her palm. “You’ve got to start taking showers instead.”

“Not steady enough on my feet.”

“Here, wet your hair.” She paddled a hand in the tepid water, to give Alfred the idea. He splashed some on his head. She could hear Gary talking to one of her friends, somebody female and chipper and St. Judean, Esther Root maybe.

“We can get a stool for the shower,” she said, lathering Alfred’s hair. “We can put a strong bar in there to hold on to, like Dr. Hedgpeth said we should. Maybe Gary can do that tomorrow.”

Alfred’s voice vibrated in his skull and on up through her fingers: “Gary and Jonah got in all right?”

“No, just Gary,” Enid said. “Jonah has a high, high fever and terrible vomiting. Poor kid, he’s much too sick to fly.”

Alfred winced in sympathy.

“Lean over now and I’ll rinse.”

If Alfred was trying to lean forward, it was evident only from a trembling in his legs, not from any change in his position.

“You need to do
much
more stretching,” Enid said. “Did you ever look at that sheet from Dr. Hedgpeth?”

Alfred shook his head. “Didn’t help.”

“Maybe Denise can teach you how to do those exercises. You might like that.”

She reached behind her for the water glass from the sink. She filled it and refilled it at the bathtub’s tap, pouring the hot water over her husband’s head. With his eyes squeezed shut he could have been a child.

“You’ll have to get yourself out now,” she said. “I won’t help you.”

“I have my own method,” he said.

Down in the living room Gary was kneeling to straighten the crooked tree.

“Who was at the door?” Enid said.

“Bea Meisner,” he said, not looking up. “There’s a gift on the mantel.”

“Bea Meisner?” A late flame of shame flickered in Enid. “I thought they were staying in Austria for the holiday.”

“No, they’re here for one day and then going to La Jolla.”

“That’s where Katie and Stew live. Did she bring anything?”

“On the mantel,” Gary said.

The gift from Bea was a festively wrapped bottle of something presumably Austrian.

“Anything else?” Enid said.

Gary, clapping fir needles from his hands, gave her a funny look. “Were you expecting something else?”

“No, no,” she said. “There was a silly little thing I asked her to get in Vienna, but I’m sure she forgot.”

Gary’s eyes narrowed. “What silly little thing?”

“Oh, nothing, just, nothing.” Enid examined the bottle to see if anything was attached to it. She’d survived her infatuation with Aslan, she’d done the work necessary to forget him, and she was by no means sure she wanted to see the Lion again. But the Lion still had power over her. She had a sensation from long ago, a pleasurable apprehension of a lover’s return. It made her miss how she used to miss Alfred.

She chided: “Why didn’t you invite her in?”

“Chuck was waiting in their Jaguar,” Gary said. “I gather they’re making the rounds.”

“Well.” Enid unwrapped the bottle—it was a Halb-Trocken Austrian champagne—to be sure there was no hidden package.

“That is an extremely sugary-looking wine,” Gary said.

She asked him to build a fire. She stood and marveled as her competent gray-haired son walked steadily to the woodpile, returned with a load of logs on one arm, deftly arranged them in the fireplace, and lit a match on the first try. The whole job took five minutes. Gary was doing nothing more than function the way a man was supposed to function, and yet, in contrast to the man Enid lived with, his capabilities seemed godlike. His least gesture was glorious to watch.

Along with her relief at having him in the house, though, came the awareness of how soon he would leave again.

Alfred, wearing a sport coat, stopped in the living room and visited with Gary for a minute before repairing to the den for a high-decibel dose of local news. His age and his stoop had taken two or three inches off his height, which not long ago had been the same as Gary’s.

While Gary, with exquisite motor control, hung the lights
on the tree, Enid sat by the fire and unpacked the liquor cartons in which she kept her ornaments. Everywhere she’d traveled she’d spent the bulk of her pocket money on ornaments. In her mind, while Gary hung them, she traveled back to a Sweden populated by straw reindeers and little red horses, to a Norway whose citizens wore authentic Lapp reindeer-skin boots, to a Venice where all the animals were made of glass, to a dollhouse Germany of enameled wood Santas and angels, to an Austria of wooden soldiers and tiny Alpine churches. In Belgium the doves of peace were made of chocolate and wrapped decoratively in foil, and in France the gendarme dolls and artiste dolls were impeccably dressed, and in Switzerland the bronze bells tinkled above overtly religious mini-crèches. Andalusia was atwitter with gaudy birds; Mexico jangled with its painted tin cutouts. On the high plateaux of China, the noiseless gallop of a herd of silk horses. In Japan, the Zen silence of its lacquered abstractions.

Gary hung each ornament as Enid directed. He was seeming different to her—calmer, more matoor, more deliberate—until she asked him to do a little job for her tomorrow.

“Installing a bar in the shower is not a ‘little job,’” he replied. “It would have made sense a year ago, but it doesn’t now. Dad can use the bathtub for another few days until we deal with this house.”

“It’s still four weeks before we fly to Philadelphia,” Enid said. “I want him to get in the habit of using the shower. I want you to buy a stool and put a bar in there tomorrow, so it’s done.”

Gary sighed. “Are you thinking you and Dad can actually stay in this house?”

“If Corecktall helps him—”

“Mother, he’s being evaluated for dementia. Do you honestly believe—”

“For
non
-
drug-related
dementia.”

“Look, I don’t want to puncture your bubble—”

“Denise has it all set up. We have to try it.”

“So, and then what?” Gary said. “He’s miraculously cured, and the two of you live here happily ever after?”

The light in the windows had died entirely. Enid didn’t understand why her sweet, responsible oldest child, with whom she’d felt such a bond from his infancy onward, became so
angry
, now, when she came to him in need. She unwrapped a Styrofoam ball that he’d decorated with fabric and sequins when he was nine or ten. “Do you remember this?”

Gary took the ball. “We made these in Mrs. Ostriker’s class.”

“You gave it to me.”

“Did I?”

“You said you’d do anything I asked tomorrow,” Enid said. “This is what I’m asking.”

“All right! All right!” Gary threw his hands in the air. “I’ll buy the stool! I’ll install the bar!”

After dinner he took the Olds from the garage, and the three of them went to Christmasland.

From the back seat Enid could see the undersides of clouds catching urban light; the patches of clear sky were darker and riddled with stars. Gary piloted the car down narrow suburban roads to the limestone gates of Waindell Park, where a long queue of cars, trucks, and minivans was waiting to enter.

“Look at all the cars,” Alfred said with no trace of his old impatience.

By charging admission to Christmasland, the county helped defray the cost of mounting this annual extravaganza. A county park ranger took the Lamberts’ ticket and told Gary to extinguish all but his parking lights. The Olds crept forward in a line of darkened vehicles that had never looked more like animals than they did now, collectively, in their humble procession through the park.

For most of the year, Waindell was a tired place of burnt grass, brown ponds, and unambitious limestone pavilions. In December, by day, it looked its very worst. Garish cables and utilitarian power lines crisscrossed the lawns. Armatures and scaffolds were exposed in their flimsiness, their pro-visionality, their metallic knobbiness of joint. Hundreds of trees and shrubs were draped in light strings, limbs sagging as if hammered by a freezing rain of glass and plastic.

By night the park was Christmasland. Enid drew breath sharply as the Olds crept up a hill of light and across a landscape made luminous. Just as the beasts were said to speak on Christmas Eve, so the natural order of the suburbs seemed overturned here, the ordinarily dark land alive with light, the ordinarily lively road dark with crawling traffic.

The mild gradients of Waindell’s slopes and the intimacy of its ridgelines’ relations with the sky were midwestern. So, it seemed to Enid, were the hush and patience of the drivers; so were the isolated close-knit frontier communities of oaks and maples. She’d spent the last eight Christmases exiled in the alien East, and now, at last, she felt at home. She imagined being buried in this landscape. She was happy to think of her bones resting on a hillside such as this.

There came scintillant pavilions, luminous reindeer, pendants and necklaces of gathered photons, electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces, a glade of towering glowing candy canes.

“Lot of work involved here,” Alfred commented.

“Well, I’m sorry Jonah couldn’t come after all,” Gary said, as if, until now, he had not been sorry.

The spectacle was nothing more than lights in darkness, but Enid was speechless. So often credulity was asked of you, so seldom could you summon it absolutely, but here at Waindell Park she could. Somebody had set out to delight all comers, and Enid was delighted. And tomorrow Denise and Chip came, tomorrow was
The Nutcracker
, and on Wednesday they would take the Christ baby from its pocket
and pin the walnut cradle to the tree: she had so much to look forward to.