The old man pushed his chair away from the table and turned once more to Chip. He said, “You can see it’s not without its difficulties.”
As he stood up, his leg buckled and he pitched to the floor, dragging his plate and place mat and coffee cup and saucer along with him. The crash might have been the last bar of a symphony. He lay on his side amid the ruins like a wounded gladiator, a fallen horse.
Chip knelt down and helped him into a sitting position while Denise hurried to the kitchen.
“It’s quarter to eleven,” Gary said as if nothing unusual had happened. “Before I leave, here’s a summary. Dad is demented and incontinent. Mom can’t have him in this house without a lot of help, which she says she doesn’t want even if she could afford it. Corecktall is obviously not an option, and so what I want to know is what you’re going to do. Now, Mother. I want to know now.”
Alfred rested his shaking hands on Chip’s shoulders and gazed in wonder at the room’s furnishings. Despite his agitation, he was smiling.
“My question,” he said. “Is who owns this house? Who takes care of all of this?”
“You own it, Dad.”
Alfred shook his head as if this didn’t square with the facts as he understood them.
Gary was demanding an answer.
“I guess we’ll have to try the drug holiday,” Enid said.
“Fine, try that,” Gary said. “Put him in the hospital, see if they ever let him out. And while you’re at it, you might take a drug holiday yourself.”
“Gary, she got rid of it,” Denise said from the floor, where she’d knelt with a sponge. “She put it in the Disposall. So just lay off.”
“Well, I hope you learned your lesson there, Mother.”
Chip, in the old man’s clothes, wasn’t able to follow this conversation. His father’s hands were heavy on his shoulders. For the second time in an hour, somebody was clinging to him, as if he were a person of substance, as if there were something to him. In fact, there was so little to him that he couldn’t even say whether his sister and his father were mistaken about him. He felt as if his consciousness had been shorn of all identifying marks and transplanted, metem-psychotically, into the body of a steady son, a trustworthy brother …
Gary had dropped into a crouch beside Alfred. “Dad,” he said, “I’m sorry it had to end this way. I love you and I’ll see you again soon.”
“Well. Yurrr vollb. Yeaugh,” Alfred replied. He lowered his head and looked around with rank paranoia.
“And you, my feckless sibling.” Gary spread his fingers, clawlike, on top of Chip’s head in what he apparently meant as a gesture of affection. “I’m counting on you to help out here.”
“I’ll do my best,” Chip said with less irony than he’d aimed for.
Gary stood up. “I’m sorry I ruined your breakfast, Mom. But I, for one, feel better for having got this off my chest.”
“Why you couldn’t have waited till after the holiday,” Enid muttered.
Gary kissed her cheek. “Call Hedgpeth tomorrow morning. Then call me and tell me what the plan is. I’m going to monitor this closely.”
It seemed unbelievable to Chip that Gary could simply walk out of the house with Alfred on the floor and Enid’s Christmas breakfast in ruins, but Gary was in his most rational mode, his words had a formal hollowness, his eyes were evasive as he put on his coat and gathered up his bag and Enid’s bag of gifts for Philadelphia, because he was afraid. Chip could see it clearly now, behind the cold front of Gary’s wordless departure: his brother was afraid.
As soon as the front door had closed, Alfred made his way to the bathroom.
“Let’s all be happy,” Denise said, “that Gary got that off his chest and feels so much better now.”
“No, he’s right,” Enid said, her eyes resting bleakly on the holly centerpiece. “Something has to change.”
After breakfast the hours passed in the sickishness, the invalid waiting, of a major holiday. Chip in his exhaustion had trouble staying warm, but his face was flushed with the heat from the kitchen and the smell of baking turkey that blanketed the house. Whenever he entered his father’s field of vision, a smile of recognition and pleasure spread over Alfred’s face. This recognition might have had the character of mistaken identity if it hadn’t been accompanied by Alfred’s exclamation of Chip’s name. Chip seemed beloved to the old man. He’d been arguing with Alfred and deploring Alfred and feeling the sting of Alfred’s disapproval for most of his life, and his personal failures and his political views were, if anything, more extreme than ever now, and yet it was Gary who was fighting with the old man, it was Chip who brightened the old man’s face.
At dinner he took the trouble to describe in some detail his activities in Lithuania. He might as well have been reciting the tax code in a monotone. Denise, normally a paragon of listening, was absorbed in helping Alfred with his food, and Enid had eyes only for her husband’s deficiencies. She flinched or sighed or shook her head at every spilled bite, every non sequitur. Alfred was quite visibly making her life a hell now.
I’m the least unhappy person at this table, Chip thought.
He helped Denise wash the dishes while Enid spoke to her grandsons on the telephone and Alfred went to bed.
“How long has Dad been like this?” he asked Denise.
“Like this? Just since yesterday. But he wasn’t great before that.”
Chip put on a heavy coat of Alfred’s and took a cigarette outside. The cold was deeper than any he’d experienced in Vilnius. Wind rattled the thick brown leaves still clinging to the oaks, those most conservative of trees; snow squeaked beneath his feet. Near zero tonight, Gary had said. He can go outside with a bottle of whiskey. Chip wanted to pursue the important question of suicide while he had a cigarette to enhance his mental performance, but his bronchi and nasal passages were so traumatized by cold that the trauma of smoke barely registered, and the ache in his fingers and ears — the damned rivets — was fast becoming unbearable. He gave up and hurried inside just as Denise was leaving.
“Where are you going?” Chip asked.
“I’ll be back.”
Enid, by the fire in the living room, was gnawing at her lip with naked desolation. “You haven’t opened your presents,” she said.
“Maybe in the morning,” Chip said.
“I’m sure I didn’t get you anything you’ll like.”
“It’s nice you got me anything.”
Enid shook her head. “This wasn’t the Christmas I’d hoped for. Suddenly Dad can’t do a thing. Not one single thing.”
“Let’s give him a drug holiday and see if that helps.”
Enid might have been reading bad prognoses in the fire. “Will you stay for a week and help me take him to the hospital?”
Chip’s hand went to the rivet in his earlobe as to a talisman. He felt like a child out of Grimm, lured into the enchanted house by the warmth and the food; and now the witch was going to lock him in a cage, fatten him up, and eat him.
He repeated the charm he’d invoked at the front door. “I can only stay three days,” he said. “I’ve got to start working right away. I owe Denise some money that I need to pay her back.”
“Just a week,” the witch said. “Just a week, until we see how things go in the hospital.”
“I don’t think so, Mom. I’ve got to go back.”
Enid’s bleakness deepened, but she didn’t seem surprised by his refusal. “I guess this is my responsibility, then,” she said. “I guess I always knew it would be.”
She retired to the den, and Chip put more logs on the fire. Cold drafts were finding ways through the windows, faintly stirring the open curtains. The furnace was running almost constantly. The world was colder and emptier than Chip had realized, the adults had gone away.