Saul doted on his wife, he doted on their children, he had doted over that boy who shot himself, and he was a sentimentalist, but that was how he was, how he always had been, ever since his father had died. He was a doter. He doted. How close this was to “dotage”! The etymology of the words — Delia as a Scrabble player took pride in her knowledge of words — must be related. She would look it up. She blamed herself for the way Saul had turned out. She had told him to be careful of his baby brother, to take care of him, noting his fragility; and some element had changed in Saul thereafter. He had become, in a sense that was difficult to pinpoint, a caretaker. He took care of things. A person shouldn’t live like that. Caretakers were servants.
Well, Delia thought, laughing inwardly as she did an inventory of cartons of soup, she should talk. He came by it honestly. If only he would leave that dreadful little city snuggled away in Michigan! But he seemed to like it. Still, it was no place for a Jew; big cities had all the advantages. The doctors were more expert, the concerts had more adventurous programs, the friends conversed more freely, and you could get a few of the amenities, including the New York Times delivered to your doorstep every morning — you didn’t go around in a cloud of unknowing.
And then Delia let her thoughts drift to her other son, to Howie, who had moved, first to Oakland and then to Moraga and then to Berkeley and then back to Oakland, and who seemed, just now, to have a steady job, working, as he said, “in retail,” though he still occasionally called her and asked for a bit of money (he called these loans “investments”), the scamp, and because Delia liked having a purpose in Howie’s life, she could never refuse him. He had grown used to having money around and missed it terribly when it was no longer there. It wouldn’t end well, Delia feared, it wouldn’t end well at all, but once they had emerged into their own lives, your children’s fragility was theirs and not yours. Handsome Howie, her bankrupt baby. Who was so attractive that his looks had been his fate in life but who seemed to love. . well, anyone? Who knew?
The thought of her younger son disturbed her, so she called up images of her grandchildren, Mary Esther, and the baby, Theo, who had been born with a handsome face but also a birthmark on his arm, an odd disfigurement in the shape of the state of Vermont. But it was tucked away where no one could see, thank God, and he’d been born with ten fingers and ten toes, and Delia had been there two weeks after he was born, and, my goodness, he was such a quiet and intelligent-looking child. His sister was already developing a mouth on her. She said, when she saw her little brother, that she wanted to throw him into the wastebasket.
She had watched Saul dressing Emmy in her snowsuit. As a father, he exhibited great tenderness, which had a touch of vanity in it, but even so. .
Delia realized that she had lost count, by virtue of her daydreaming, and returned to her work. As she did, she heard the sound of two cars colliding out on the street. Immediately she looked up and saw through the doorway a man in a threadbare suit getting out of his car dazedly. In front of him, a teenager, a girl, sat behind the wheel of her car, on her face a broad staring smile, of shock. Her car’s windshield had cracked in a spiderweb pattern where her head had struck it, and blood was beginning to ooze down from her forehead toward her self-sustaining grin. In slow motion, her hands lifted themselves to her face, to feel it, to detect if it was still there. Delia dropped what she was doing to rush out to the street, to try to help, to murmur some consolation to the threadbare man and the smiling bleeding girl.
Twenty-six
The strands of toilet paper — were they like a set of icicles? or delicate traceries on a canvas? or thin cirrus clouds? or the white strings of misaligned protein molecules collecting in the wasting brain hemispheres of an Alzheimer patient? — the white strands of toilet paper hung down from the branches of Saul and Patsy’s tree in the front yard: ugly, and malice-begotten, and, finally, defeating all comparison. It was just toilet paper thrown into the tree. Patsy, seeing it there while stepping outside to get the morning paper, called out, “Saul! Goddamn it, Saul. Get out of bed and come see what they’ve done to us this time!”
After a few moments, during which Patsy watched a robin’s attempt to fly between the tree’s branches and the dangling toilet paper, Saul came shuffling onto the front stoop, rubbing his face violently with both hands. He put his palm on Patsy’s shoulder for balance as he lifted his left foot to scratch his right leg near the knee. Gazing at the tree, he said, with what seemed to be a tremendous effort at remaining calm, “Blue sky today. You know, I’ve really got to quit my job. Yeah,” he said, agreeing with himself, and nodding, “today is the perfect day for it, a blue-sky quitting day.” He breathed his stale dream-breath on her. “Today I quit.” Another pause. “I am no longer an educator. Today I am an un-educator.”
Patsy glanced at her husband, sizing him up. Hard to think of what else he would do with himself if he wasn’t in a classroom. Nor could she imagine what the world would welcome from him. Unemployment, maybe: the world would be happy to have Saul in no occupation whatsoever.
“Look,” he said, pointing. “They’ve painted the lawn blue.” She followed his pointing finger as directed. Yes, indeed, the little troop of local thugs had found some blue house paint and had poured it over their grass in no particular pattern. Vandal action painting alfresco. A blue lawn— she had never wanted such a thing or heard of it, except in a book she had once read. “He had come a long way to this blue lawn”—it was the only phrase she could remember from whatever book it was. Well, she had come a long way to this blue lawn, but this time the blue lawn wasn’t a metaphor but an object of the adolescent devils of the community, still excitable boys and girls, still intent on destruction.
Saul shuffled back into the house, fingering his nose. In the early morning he sometimes reminded her of a grumpy old man, coughing, as spiky as a pincushion, plagued with odd odors, opinionated and rather unclean.
You didn’t get rid of a contagion by blessing and burying its unquiet spirit, Patsy thought, as she went back inside to help Emmy get up and get dressed, and Theo diapered and fed. She had told him so and she was right. The unquiet spirits once stirred to action stayed stirred until they could manage some blood-spilling mayhem. Then they cooled down. Or else: they never would cool down. In the myths people lived by, devils stayed hot forever, perpetually fevered and licked by flames.
He wasn’t about to go to medical school or law school — Patsy understood that, at least. He had an abiding distaste for doctors as a class, and an equal distrust of lawyers — like bottleflies at the scene of illness and trouble. He didn’t want to turn himself into either one and had said so. In any case, his family on both sides was overpopulated with dermatologists and radiologists and litigators and patent attorneys and estate planners. They were all formidably short-tempered and quite well-off; Howie, of course, was the exception. Their topics of conversation often seemed to be limited to their golf games and their investment portfolios. A few waxed eloquent about their remodeled kitchens and their trips to Cancún. Saul had one uncle who could talk learnedly for an hour about his Sub-Zero refrigerator and his Vulcan gas stove. This mania for appliances was attached to both the men and the women. Their professions had addled them and reduced their sympathetic imaginations to small vestigial stumps.