“Right.”
“You won’t tell Saul, will you? Promise?”
“No. I won’t,” Patsy said.
“Wish me luck.”
“Good luck.”
“Thank you. That was nice. I always wished I had a daughter, Patsy, but now I have you. And it’s better having you than having a real daughter, because I would never have dared to tell her this. Goodbye, dear.”
“Goodbye,” Patsy said. She dropped the phone onto its cradle and sat for a moment waiting, trying to think of what Delia meant by that daughter statement. If she had had a real daughter, Delia had implied, she would have felt ashamed of herself and would never have confessed to having taken a lover, a boy still in high school, because. . why? Because her daughter’s opinion would have mattered to her, and Patsy’s opinion didn’t? Or because she wouldn’t have wanted her daughter to think of her as an example? She tried to fight off the feeling that she was angry, and then she was angry, perspiring with anger, and not fighting it. A slight breeze blew in through the screen, and she closed her eyes to it.
She went back up the stairs and saw Saul standing in front of the window, bouncing Mary Esther and talking to her, long strings of Saul-talk. He had changed her diaper. When Patsy came into the doorway, Saul gave her a steady look. “Who was that? Was that my mother?”
“Yes,” Patsy said. She liked watching her husband hold their daughter. She took pride in Saul’s child-care skills, his intuitive leaps into infancy. Good husbands who were good lovers rarely made good fathers, too, and it was her impression that such men were exceptionally uncommon birds. Apparently Saul hadn’t picked it up from his own father, but he had gotten it from somewhere. It made up for his other relentlessly irritating habits. “She just called to chat. You can call her back any time.” Saul nodded. “Actually, that’s not right,” Patsy said. “I lied. That part about the chat. Your mother has taken a boyfriend,” Patsy said, “an actual boy, this time — in high school.” The words leapt out of her without her having been completely aware that she was saying them. Then they were gone, free of her, broadcast into the air.
Saul’s face immediately broke into its constituent parts, one eyebrow going one way, the other eyebrow going another, the mouth drooping down here, rising there.
Patsy said, rushing ahead of herself, “The Marschallin didn’t want me to tell you, and she said that if I had been her real daughter, she wouldn’t have told me in the first place, but I guess I just broke my promise to her.” Jesus, listen to me, Patsy thought.
Saul went on holding Mary Esther, bouncing her. The baby was hungry and was crying softly now, working up to some real noise. “You shouldn’t have told me, Patsy,” he said, with an odd, disarming calm. “I bet she told all of that to you in confidence.”
“No kidding.” She held her arms out. “Here. Give me the baby.”
As he handed over Mary Esther, Saul appeared to be in a daze. “But you did. I wonder why. You broke a promise to her?” Patsy nodded, even though Saul wasn’t looking at her. “Who is it, this lover?”
“The yard boy.”
“The yard boy. Just like my mother to do that,” Saul said, dispiritedly. Patsy perceived — odd that she hadn’t noticed before — that Saul had no clothes on. She was so used to him by now that his nakedness made absolutely no impression on her except when he was amorous, or when she was. He pulled the window’s curtain aside. The time was eight minutes after nine o’clock, she knew. “We should move to Berlin. That’d serve her right. There’s Gordy, by the way.”
Stepping up close to Saul at the window, Patsy lowered the straps of her nightgown and lifted Mary Esther, who at fifteen months was becoming quite heavy. She brought her daughter to her nipple and, as she did, registered how substantial her daughter was and how soon she would not be nursing her anymore. Really, she wasn’t a baby now. All this breastfeeding would be over in no time at all. She would miss it, miss it like crazy, even with all the pain and soreness. But then there would be another baby, Theo. “What did you say?” she asked. “I was distracted.” Mary Esther was sucking at her greedily.
“I said that Gordy is here.” Patsy thought all at once that they shouldn’t be standing naked at their bedroom window looking out at Gordy Himmelman. Just being visible in their own bedroom, they were inciting him to riot. But her anger, which had not died down from the phone call, kept her there in a frozen tableau with Sauclass="underline" here was Sunday morning, a day — of all days — when young married couples could lie around naked, make love, feed the baby, read the paper, do anything they wanted to do, indoors or out, and there, on the front lawn, was Gordy Himmelman, their sentry, their guard dog, their zombie, their boy. With his little demands for attention, he was getting tiresome. What Patsy craved was her own attention, hers and Saul’s and Emmy’s, and she lifted her hand, as if to start a dance, a dance of please-go-away. “Sometimes I hate my mother,” Saul said without warning.
Gordy Himmelman turned his gaze toward them. He stared for a long time at Saul and Patsy.
“You shouldn’t hate your mother. She’s only human. And by the way, we shouldn’t be here, exposing ourselves to that ruffian on the lawn,” Patsy said.
“What? What’s his name?” Saul asked. “Her boyfriend.”
“Oh, the boyfriend? His name’s Jimmy,” Patsy said, and at that point Gordy pulled out a gun from his back pocket, grinned momentarily, then opened his mouth, directed the barrel of the gun toward it, and then inside it, and fired. A flower-pattern of Gordy’s blood and brains splashed against the tree trunk behind his head, and he fell backward.
The sound of the gun made the baby startle: her arms flew up to the sides of her face, and she pulled her mouth away from her mother’s breast before looking up into her mother’s eyes for an explanation. A trace of breast milk remained on her lower lip.
Part Two
That is what people are like in my district.
Always expecting the impossible from the doctor.
Nine
The day had been beautiful with clear, dry air — though the sun was penetrating in a late-June sort of way — but now no wind or breeze blew through the yard while the various officials swarmed over the front lawn. The air felt still, or stillborn. Saul, in shock, thought that the patrol cars’ flashing red lights gave the driveway the look of a movie set, or a television docudrama. Something, he wasn’t sure what, didn’t seem real about it. He himself felt less solid — unconcretized — than he had for years. Too much more de-realization, he thought, and he would fade right out.
The county medical examiner came to collect the body, and to pry into the bark of the tree for skull fragments. They took the gun out of Gordy’s hand and placed it in an evidence bag. Then Gordy’s body was loaded, one man reaching underneath the skinny shoulders and another at the ankles and feet in their scruffy, unlaced high-tops, onto a coroner’s gurney. They covered all of it with a white sheet. Having loaded it— him — they took the body away to be examined in closer detail, for drugs in particular. They had explained all this. Three men sauntered toward Saul and Patsy for questions, two regular cops and one investigating detective, and Saul and Patsy offered them coffee that they declined to drink.