But, no: there on the goddamn fucking front page is a picture of his goddamn fucking front yard. In a separate column the editors have inserted a school picture of Gordy Himmelman, sporting a flattop. The boy looks dense and clueless and lunar and mean. He has the appearance of a convict-in-training. Leaning back in his chair, the husband considers the view out the kitchen window at this boy and the represented yard— his angle is different from that of the camera — and past it, to Whitefeather Road, when he notices that a car has slowed down so that its three occupants can point at the linden tree, where the blood is, though not on their side. The wife notes that her husband is observing some phenomenon or other, calculates the angle of his observation, and regards the scene outside the window. Gordy Himmelman, the deceased, stands vacantly out there. He is a little less dead this time than he was before.
“Gawkers,” she says calmly.
“Rubberneckers,” he says.
Patsy reaches out and grasps his hand. She caresses her husband’s knuckles and says she’s making some eggs for herself, would he like some, too? Scrambled? Yes, he would. She rises — she is still in her nightgown and slippers — and cracks four eggs into a frypan, adds some garlic powder, onion salt, some butter, a dash of milk, dash of Tabasco, paprika as it is dished up, a formula her husband likes and that she has learned from him. He prefers his scrambled eggs slightly runny, not. . dried out. She wouldn’t like eggs cooked this way if she weren’t married to Saul. As she stands at the stove, her husband tells her that she is beautiful. He is good at this: he always compliments her spontaneously and with an air of sincerity and rarely with the hope of reward.
As she is mixing the ingredients in the frypan, before turning the burner on a low-medium heat, she says, “I wonder if there’ll be a funeral,” and her husband says, “I doubt it. He’s not dead enough to bury.”
It is fourteen minutes past eight.
At twenty-three minutes past ten, the wife finally puts the phone back on the hook, and within thirty seconds, it rings. She decides that she won’t answer it, no matter who the caller might be. But her decisions have little to do with what she actually does. In any case, a ringing telephone can sometimes sound like a command or a scream following any domestic catastrophe. That is how it sounds now. Her husband is still in his pajamas, eating a midmorning bowl of cereal, Emmy on his shoulder asleep and drooling. When she answers the phone, their daughter startles into wakefulness. The caller is Patsy’s friend Julie Dusenberg, asking if there’s anything she can do. Food? Aid and comfort? She and Patsy talk for a while, and after the call ends and Patsy puts the receiver back down, the phone rings again, more insistently this time, louder, like a heavier knock on the door. This time, the caller is one of Saul’s former students, Jeffrey Yonkey, wanting to say how sorry he is about the whole Gordy Himmelman thing. Patsy, surprised by the call, thanks him for his trouble, hangs up, and once again the phone starts to ring. The phone, today, is the other baby, crying and carrying on. There is nothing to do to quiet this baby except to talk softly to it.
Patsy picks up the receiver, and a voice says, “Hi, it’s Gordy.”
She waits to see whether the prankster has any other ideas of what to say or how to extend a cold and sadistic antic mischief using the voice of a day-old suicide, and because he doesn’t, because he’s a cruel and unimaginative juvenile, a long, slow, uneasy silence reigns until she delicately places her finger on the receiver hook, disconnecting him. Then she releases it. A faint dial tone hums into the air from the hanging phone. From the radio on the other side of the room, tuned to the local NPR affiliate, a waltz drifts absentmindedly into the air. What would it be? Ah, “The Merry Widow.” Franz Lehar. Now the baby is wide awake, and Saul has finished his cereal.
“I don’t like waltz music,” Patsy says, shaking her head. “Too much butter. Too much cholesterol. It’s just too. . Viennese.”
“Who was that?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the telephone. He has moved into the living room and is holding Mary Esther’s arms up, so that she can practice her lurch-walking. She can stand on her own. So she is not a baby after all, but a toddler.
“Julie Dusenberg first. Then Jeffrey Yonkey. And then a crank caller,” Patsy tells him. “You want some more coffee? Should I brew up a new pot?”
“What’d he want, the crank caller?” He half-turns toward her, gives her a look from a half-closed eye, playing the role of the inspector.
“He was a. . crank. Cranks don’t want anything,” she says.
“They want your attention,” Saul says. “What’d this one want?” He scoops his daughter up into his arms and twirls her around. The movement is festive, but the effect is one of great sadness.
“Some kid,” Patsy tells him. “Said he was Gordy.”
“More,” Emmy seems to say, making her parents smile.
Saul, for some reason, doesn’t seem particularly surprised. “Oh. Gordy. What’d he want?”
“Saul, I just told you.” She takes a long sip of her tea. “It was a pretender. He didn’t want anything. Said his name and then stopped. Oh.” She straightens up and smiles. “He asked us how we were doing.”
“That’s not like him. Gordy always wanted something. He never bothered to ask us how we were doing. He was too sullen for that.”
“Gordy’s dead, honey. He shot himself. Remember? This was. . what I told you. An imposter. Just a kid.”
“Yup.”
“Come on, Saul. Let’s not get all creepy about this.”
“I’m not. I’m not being creepy. Besides, I’m not the one who called.” He gives her one of his odd housebroken smiles. These particular smiles always take the breath out of her. Nothing with Saul is unconditional when he is under stress; you always have to be slightly on your guard with him.
“It was just some kid,” Patsy says. “Some kid-who-was-not-Gordy. One of your disgruntled students. You know,” she says, “the woods are full of rural levity today.”
“I didn’t notice you laughing. Did you smile? Did you laugh?”
These are not friendly questions. They have a coldness that startles her. Maybe they should have made love after all. He feels her as she approaches him from behind, reaching around his chest, leaning her head against his back, standing there, just holding on, wanting him to anchor her. “Sometimes I think you’re the last humanist,” she mutters. “Sometimes I wonder how we’ll ever get on with things with you around.”
“Why do you say that?” He waits for a moment, then adds an endearment. “Honey?” There is a slight charge of irony, a sourness, to this, of love drained out of the endearment and bitterness poured in.
“Because,” she says, “here’s this kid. He’s stupid. He’s mean to you. He writes you terrible, illiterate notes. He doesn’t like you. He knocks over your beehives. But he shows up here like a little thug with his handgun, and then you take him home. And then for months and months he hangs around our yard, staring at us like the boy outside the bakery window with his nose pressed against the glass. And finally he shoots himself for no particular reason except he’s got his hands on a firearm again. So all day yesterday we try to explain what there’s no explanation for. And there’s nobody on the planet who’ll grieve, Saul, except for you. So you try to do it. You really do make the effort. Credit where credit is due. For a worthless no-account illiterate ignorant anti-Semitic kid, you go the full charitable nine yards. The sadness, the remorse. That’s why. Only the last humanist would do that. Everybody else, really, Saul, I’m not kidding, would be glad to see him gone. Well, not glad, but, you know.”