Christmas in Austin
Page 31
*
Kids and grown-ups ate together. There were several days of leftovers to get through, cold goose and potatoes, and curry and rice from the Vietnamese place, which Clémence had heated up. Everything was laid out on the kitchen counter—you just came and took. (Susie had also decided to boil some pasta, as a kind of filler, in case any of the kids wanted something simple, pasta and cheese, but most of it went uneaten, and after the meal Susie found herself picking at sticky bits of macaroni while clearing the table and doing the dishes, until she emptied the pot into the trash with a feeling of … for once, let it go.)
Dana and Paul went up to put Cal to bed. Paul said, “Don’t wait.”
And then, at dinner, Liesel and Jean got in a stupid argument about Rose.
Liesel was very fond of Rose, and not just fond but full of admiration for her. She was a very uncomplaining woman, when she had many things to complain about. Liesel felt grateful, too, because Rose in spite of everything showed up at their wedding, when nobody else from Bill’s family would come. And for Liesel’s family it was too far to travel. But Rose took the bus from New York, against her parents’ wishes. She got all dressed up, as if she thought … but they got married at the registry, with a couple of friends to sign the papers. Rose was very disappointed, and maybe even felt, which wasn’t totally inaccurate, that she was really in the way. She kept getting the tone wrong, she didn’t know what to talk about, she tried to make polite conversation.
Her whole life was a little like this. Her life was like one of those days where you can’t decide what to do, you argue about whether to go out or stay in, and then it starts raining when you finally leave the house, and the restaurant is closed, so you try somewhere else, which turns out to be a disappointment. And nothing turns out the way you want it to.
“That’s ridiculous,” Jean told her. “That’s a ridiculous thing to say. You can’t say that kind of thing about people.” And then: “You could say that about me.”
“I would never say that about you.” Liesel was genuinely hurt. “Your life is a good life,” she said, indignantly.
“I’m thirty-two years old. I’m going out with my boss, who is getting a divorce because of me. The only reason we can afford where I live is because of him, and because you lend us money.”
“Please, I don’t care about the money. The money is yours, it’s mine, it doesn’t matter.”
“I’m just saying that someone like Rose, the difference between her life and mine, is cushioning … it’s privilege, it’s because I’m spoiled. You spoil me.”
“Listen, don’t talk like this. You don’t even believe it.” Her face, under the gray hair, was going red; her eyes were shining, her accent, under the pressure of feeling, began to sound foreign. “Rose was in many ways an impressive woman, but she had no self-discipline. She sat in that house all day, she put on weight. She didn’t have a job.”
“That’s just a generational thing.”
“Who are you saying this to?” Liesel asked. “What generation do you think I belong to?”
“Yes, but you … nothing gets to you. Everything bounces off.”
“I don’t know what that means.” But Liesel had heard it before. “And if we’re talking about money,” she added, “Bill gave Rose money, too. Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. It’s not a question of money.” And so on.
Really what bugged Jean is the way Liesel talked about Rose—her tone, as if Rose’s death were an occasion for working out what you really felt about her. An interesting test of the affections. As if that’s what mattered. And five minutes later Liesel asked Nathan if he thought she needed to go to the funeral. By Jewish law Rose was supposed to be buried as early as possible, within twenty-four hours, though Rose was not particularly observant, and with her grandson in Chicago, nothing was likely to happen before Friday.
“I don’t want to go,” she said. “Everybody’s here.” And then, to placate Jean: “Henrik is coming, I want to meet him.”
Jean raised her eyes at this, but she wasn’t really mad. She was upset but also anxious about other things, which both of them knew.
“Talk to Bill,” Nathan told his mother. “I don’t think he’ll care.”
“Of course he cares,” Susie said. “He’s alone out there, he’s got to deal with everything himself. I don’t expect Judith will help much.”
“Judith won’t help at all. But it’s not the short-term aggravation I’m worried about. What happens will happen, Rose is dead, there’s not much they can really get wrong, as far as she’s concerned. None of this is fun for Bill, I get that—it’s the opposite of fun. But in a few days it will be over. The long-term fallout is what worries me more. Judith and Alex are going to argue about money and Bill is going to be caught in the middle of it.”
“It’s not a question of,” Susie said, “it’s not a question of getting it right or wrong. There are some things you do even if it doesn’t make a difference. Somebody from our family, I mean other than Bill, should be there. Somebody should be there for Bill.”
“So go.”
“May is ten months old. I’m still nursing her twice a day. I’d love to go but I don’t think …”
“So don’t go. Nobody’s making you.”
David gave Clémence a look across the table, from which she turned away. She didn’t like being roped in like that, as if they were laughing at the Essingers together. Also, it annoyed her the way everybody relied on Nathan to make certain decisions, to deal with certain aspects of family business, and then blamed him for sounding unemotional or disinterested.
He seemed to feel something similar because he changed the subject. “Why don’t you tell us what Dodie said to you about Earl Mosby?” he asked Julie. “We knocked on her door this afternoon, and Dodie said …”
But Julie didn’t want to; she was embarrassed. What she had told her father was a kind of confession—she still felt bad about it. About not correcting Dodie or objecting when she said … but it was hard to remember exactly what she had said. “Her basic point, though,” Julie in spite of herself was trying to explain, “her point was something like, in the Fifties and Sixties, when they first moved here, everybody got along much better than they do now, black people and white people, even if the black people were all basically servants, everybody kind of knew their place. Whereas now—”
And Nathan interrupted her. “I thought she also said that these days there really aren’t any African Americans in the neighborhood at all—that there’s no interaction.”
“I think that’s what she said.” And she looked at Liesel. “She said that people were upset when you didn’t let Mosby stay.”
“She can’t have said that. There was never really any question. I mean, by the time we bought the house … we never met him. You must have misunderstood her.”
“Are you excited about sleeping out in the playhouse tonight?” Jean asked her.
“Isn’t it a little late for that?” Susie said. It was almost eight o’clock, and a cold night after a clear afternoon. The curtains were drawn and the heating was on. Liesel had already draped blankets over the patio plants.
“What do you mean?”
“I just thought that, given what’s happened, we could leave it be.”
But Nathan was quick to sense interference. “What’s Rose got to do with it? We spent all morning setting up.”
Ben said, “I don’t think she wants to do it anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
Nathan looked at his nephew, who had kept a straight face and sounded sympathetic. He looked like his father, but thinner: an English schoolboy, with little round glasses and a pale complexion.
“I don’t think she wants to. She’s—”
“I’m not scared.”
“I didn’t say you were. I just think you changed your mind.”
“What are you talking about? I haven’t said anything.”
“Well, it’s what I think.”
&n
bsp; “Of course she wants to,” Nathan said. “It’s all set up.”
But Ben was right and her father was wrong. This is what upset her, and why she had to stick up for her father now, she couldn’t help it. And so after dinner while the table was being cleared she got ready for sleeping in the cold—and put on socks and a sweater over her pajamas. Even Clémence was against the idea and at one point took Nathan aside. “Have you talked to her about this?” she said.
“Of course I’ve talked to her.”
“I mean have you talked to her again?”
“I don’t know what that means. We’ve been talking about it all day.”
“Well, she says one thing to you and another to me.”
“Then what difference will it make if I talk to her some more?” he asked, reasonably enough, and Julie herself (they were in the back apartment) intervened.
“It’s fine, Mom. I want to do it.”
Liesel was only dimly aware of these undercurrents—Paul and Dana still hadn’t come down to dinner. In spite of everything else that was going on, she noticed. A point in her favor, a little chalk mark on the right side of the ledger. At nine o’clock, with the kitchen cleared, she put her head around the door of the TV room and said, “I’m going to bed.”
“Good night, Mom. Good night, Liesel. Good night.”
Paul was there now, lying on the carpet with his head on a pillow. They were watching a basketball game. Jean, David, and Ben sat on the sofa.
“Where’s Dana?” she asked.
“She’s gone to bed, too.”
“Is Cal okay?”
“He’s fine, he’s just sort of clingy. And Dana was tired anyway.”
“She’s a good girl,” Liesel said, but Paul didn’t answer.
In her old slippers, Liesel had to be careful on the wooden floors, which were very smooth, especially the stairs. She went up slowly, holding the bannister. From her dressing room, with its window overlooking the backyard, she could see a light in the playhouse window. Or thought she could see it, under the billboard advertising Jose Cuervo, which was also lit up. Poor Julie, Liesel thought, in her little cabin. But she was thinking of Nathan, too—like father like daughter.
After brushing her teeth, she sat on her bed and called Bill in Yonkers. He didn’t have a cell phone; she had to look up Rose’s number in her address book.
He picked up on the first ring. “Judith’s sleeping,” he said. “I should keep my voice down.”
“How are you doing?”
“I’m okay, I’m fine. I’m just sorry I didn’t get to the hospital earlier. I was waiting for Judith, she wanted to talk to Mikey, but everything with her takes twice as long as it should.”
“I thought Rose died in the night.”
“Yes.”
“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“Probably not. Listen, at some point, we’re going to have to go through all these clothes. I don’t know if there’s anything you or the girls might want.”
“They wouldn’t fit, would they?”
“Well, there are things like shoes, there are coats. Some of them are basically still in the box. She bought these things online and never wore them.”
“What about Judith?”
“Right now, she says she doesn’t want anything. She associates all this stuff with … she’s still in the middle of this fight with her mother. She doesn’t realize yet that the fight is over. But I don’t want to just throw it all away. Some of it looks pretty expensive. Some of the shoes. I don’t know what size the girls are.”
“I’ll ask them tomorrow,” Liesel said, and they talked like this for another few minutes before hanging up. Bill, sitting on Rose’s bed, with the heating on full, and the snow in the park opposite Rose’s house visible under the streetlamps.
*
Nathan sat with Julie for a minute after she turned off her light. Still in his shorts, he felt the hairs on his legs uncurling in the night air. The room smelled damp, like an old sofa, it was very dusty, too. Not a nice place to sleep. The darkness seemed very present somehow, it seemed to come right up to the window. He could also hear party noises from the alley behind their backyard, maybe one of the bars was open.
“If at any point in the night you want to come back to the house,” he said. “Nobody’s going to judge you for it. Even if you just need to pee.”
“Ben will make fun of me.”
“I don’t care what Ben says. You can use the bathroom and just get into bed.”
Julie said, “I feel bad I didn’t say anything to Dodie.”
She felt childish, sleeping on a mattress on the floor. Her father sat above her, on a kids’ chair, with his knees up.
“What could you have said?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I could have challenged her.”
She couldn’t really see his face in the dark. Just the shape of his head, framed by long hair, which he rarely combed, and a patch of indistinctness around his mouth—he hadn’t shaved in several days.
Eventually he said, “She’s an old woman. She’s been here a long time. It’s not unreasonable for you to think about what kind of information she might have for you, before you correct her.”
“I just feel bad. I feel like, I talk a lot about this kind of stuff, but then when I actually have a chance to … say something … I just … I didn’t want to be impolite.”
“That’s a normal thing not to want. This stuff isn’t easy.” And then: “I’m in a similar position right now.”
“What do you mean?”
He started to explain himself carefully. Part of what she loved about her father is that he had these conversations with her, even though they made her nervous, too, she felt almost shy, because she didn’t want to disappoint him. One of his students had emailed him about a petition they were drawing up in reaction to the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. It was about gun control and contained a certain amount of highly abbreviated constitutional arguments on the right to bear arms. Anyway, they hoped he would sign it, several of his colleagues already had. This put him in a difficult position.
“Why?” she said. “I mean, don’t you think … I just assumed …”
“Look. The gun laws in this country are ridiculous. What happened in Sandy Hook was unspeakable. There’s no question about that. But I’m used to making my own legal arguments. Certain points in the petition have been simplified more than I’m really comfortable with. I can come back at them with suggestions but that’s not what they want from me. They want me to sign it.”
“So don’t sign it.”
“That’s not so simple either. It looks like a statement if I refuse. It seems to put me on the wrong side. There’s also the fact that I have a good relationship with these students—they think of me as one of the good guys.”
“But that’s not a reason … to do something you don’t believe in. That’s like doing something because it makes you popular.”
Nathan didn’t say anything for a minute, and Julie could hear the music on Fruth Street—the bass sounds, distorted by the speakers. She was worried about what she would feel when Nathan left. The playhouse was really very small. And the door didn’t lock, it didn’t even close properly. The screen door just had a little hook, the kind you use in bathrooms. Between the playhouse and the main house was about eighty or a hundred feet of dark lawn; she was closer to the back gate. Anybody could wander in, but there was no reason to. She was being ridiculous.
“There’s something else,” her father said at last. “Another reason I don’t want to sign the petition. If I hope at any point to become a federal judge, and it’s a possibility I’d like to keep open, this is the kind of thing that can make life difficult at the confirmation hearings. The gun control lobby is very powerful.”
“That doesn’t seem like a good reason,” Julie said.
“You don’t think so?”
“I mean, because you’re scared what people might say about you.”
“Are you going to sign it?” Julie asked.
“What do you think I should do?”
“What would you want me to do?”
Nathan looked at his daughter. He could see her eyes in the dark, looking up at him. “What do you think I’d want you to do?”
She thought. “I think you’d want me to sign it.”
“Yes,” he said, and sat there for another minute before bending down on his knees to kiss her good night. He was really very cold by this point, almost shivery, and feeling strangely vulnerable or emotional, which sometimes happened to him when he got too cold. Julie, when the screen door closed behind him, slid out of bed to put it on the hook and then scrambled back in with dusty feet, and lay under the duvet, listening to the music, which seemed to get louder when she closed her eyes.
* * *
When he woke up he could see his mother. She lay on her belly with her head to the side, breathing heavily. The outside light cast rays through their bedroom window, which was directly above it. Shadows from the French blinds lay like the steps of a ladder against the ceiling. Cal felt fine, he felt wide awake, he needed to pee. For most of the day, he had drifted in and out of vagueness and clarity, but now he felt hungry, he felt normal. Liesel had given him a pair of slippers for Christmas, more like woolly boots than shoes, and he sat on the edge of his mattress and put them on.
The bathroom was at the end of the hall. Under the old rug, the floorboards seemed to ache when you stepped on them. There was a table against the wall, with a bowl and a pitcher on it, and whenever Cal ran along the corridor Liesel told him to watch out for the bowl. If the rug slipped out from underneath him … It was very old; it cost lots of money. So he walked carefully. When he shut the bathroom door, it swung and banged against the frame. Everything sounded loud in the night. Even the noise of his pee against the water in the toilet, so he tried to pee on the porcelain instead. But it was nice to pee; he peed and peed, and afterward washed his hands but didn’t flush. He didn’t want to make more noise.