Saul and Patsy

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.

They had checked the scene for a suicide note, they said. But there was no evidence of one, and Saul told them it wasn’t likely that such a note would ever show up. They asked why. Saul said that Gordy could barely write at all. A suicide note was pretty much beyond him.

Outside in the sunlight, and then in the kitchen for the sake of the shade, first Saul and then Patsy explained about Gordy’s previous trips out to their houses, this one and the one they’d rented. Inexplicable, but with a vague, lost-in-space purpose. Saul explained about the remedial language-arts class, the anti-Semitic scrawlings, the beehives. Gordy didn’t really know much of anything about Jews, Saul claimed. They were a convenience. It was like Israel for the Arabs, he said, briefly losing his cool. When Saul mentioned the notes, the cops became interested again. So he could write, after all. They had caught him in a contradiction. Had Saul saved them, these notes? No, he had not. One of the men went out with Saul to check the exact location where Gordy had been standing.

While they were gone, Mary Esther gazed from her mother’s elbow at the two remaining men and then, once Saul returned, from her father’s arms. She seemed interested in their hats and held out her hands as if to grab them by their wide brims.

The men from the sheriff ’s office were particularly intrigued with Gordy’s obsessive fascination with Saul and Patsy’s houses. Why had he stared at them? What had he wanted from them? Why this strange attention-deficit persistence? Had he threatened the family in any way?

No, not exactly. They claimed not to know why he kept coming out to see them, but that answer was unsatisfactory; it answered nothing. Finally Patsy said, “He was a slow student. He was in Saul’s remedial class, of course, and he didn’t do well. I think he wanted us to teach him how to read. He wanted us to pay attention to him. Or to teach him. . how to do something.”

Saul shook his head. “No. That’s not it. It’s more complicated. He was trying to get us to adopt him. He was like. .” Sitting at the kitchen table, his fingers knitted together, Saul was about to say that Gordy was like Dr. Victor Frankenstein’s orphaned creature, made out of spare human parts, wandering around looking for love and wanting someone to notice him grunting and groaning, threatening to become a monster and then becoming an actual monster, but, strategically, he made himself go silent. After all, he himself had not known what to do with him. Finally he said, “He was like a lot of boys.”

Then, to give them a story, if not the story, Saul told them about Gordy’s visit from a year ago, when Gordy had waved the gun around in the front yard of their rented house and Saul had taken him and his bicycle and the gun back home. Gordy had been threatening, without actually threatening anything or anyone specifically, in detail. He had just wanted to be generically threatening, adolescent boy stuff, white rural gangsta midwestern skull-and-crossbones Fear This and Don’t Fuck With Me sort of stuff. He was a messed-up kid; that was maybe the entire story. “He didn’t think about things,” Saul said. “He probably shot himself without thinking about it. Maybe he would’ve shot one of us without thinking about it. He had a weird kind of spontaneity.”

They nodded, but their nodding did not indicate agreement. They wrote it all down. Then they went outside again, to confer.

Half an hour later, Gordy’s aunt Brenda arrived. Saul and Patsy went outside to meet her. As she removed herself from her vehicle, a rusting Ford pickup, she expertly finger-flicked her cigarette out onto the lawn. She was still dressed in her waitress clothes, with a pink barrette in her hair, an application of lipstick and perfume, and — Saul was at first surprised, and then not surprised at all — she smiled automatically at the two cops standing near the front door of the house. She was accustomed to cops, Saul realized. For her, a waitress in a diner, cops were familiar and friendly customers, people she saw every day. But the smile was completely insincere — never had a face been built that conveyed less benevolence and good humor than this one. Her somber unattractiveness, her worn-down sorrowfulness, had no appeal.

She walked up first to Saul, who was standing by the tree where Gordy had shot himself. “Hi,” she said. She shook his hand. Her face was a conglomeration of pockmarks and scars, perhaps the worst complexion he had ever seen on a woman. The perfume and the barrette and the lipstick did nothing to mitigate her appearance. They magnified the effect of helplessness. “Oh that boy. What a terrible situation here. That poor crazy clueless kid.” She glanced around. She sobbed once. “What did they do with his body? I got to see it. This is such a waste,” she said, the phrase coming out of her mouth tonelessly. She didn’t seem surprised, despite her spasmodic grief — the zombie affect apparently ran in the family. It was the most peculiar response to a death that Saul had ever witnessed, though it occurred to him that it might be a form of working-class stoicism. If she had any grief, she would not give it away to the likes of Saul and Patsy.

Or what — he thought — what if she had been expecting this?

Any parent, any guardian would inevitably, Saul thought, be crying and making a scene. That was the standard expectation. But she seemed to be in steady though perhaps uncertain control of herself, standing there in her unattractive dignity. Saul wished he could think of some other category besides ugliness when he looked at her. But that word was inescapable with Brenda Bagley. She made you think about her looks the way a professional beauty would; she commanded your attention. Just being around her, you fell down a notch or two, you became less than you were, because you couldn’t help but notice her shortcomings. Against Brenda’s deficiencies, the gods themselves would have struggled in vain. He also wished he had some consolation to give her, but he did not. The correct words and phrases flew away from him, were gone. Calmly, still gazing down, inconsolable, she said, “Oh, my lord, I wish I knew where Gordy’s father got himself to. He went out to Wyoming looking for work a couple years ago, and I haven’t heard from him since, and here his son is gone for good and ever. And he doesn’t even know. There’s something else I don’t get.”

“What don’t you get?” Saul asked.

“No TV.”

“What?”

“Where’s the TV reporters? Doesn’t this count for something? A boy dying by his own hand? Just because it was a poor kid like Gordy don’t mean you can’t report it. It’s like he counts for nothing. A pig runs away from the farmyard and they cover it on the news. A purse gets snatched and they cover it for a week. What about this? You’ve got a poor dropout being dead here by his own self-violence, and that ain’t a story? Can you explain to me how come they aren’t doing coverage?”

“Maybe they’re busy.” He shrugged. “They just aren’t here yet,” Saul told her. “Thank God. I don’t know why. Do you want to see where it happened? Brenda, how did he get that gun?”

“No. Yes. Well, okay. Sure.” She nodded her head, and Saul dutifully pointed down at the tree trunk where the blood was drying. “Right here then. How awful,” Gordy’s aunt said, reaching into her purse for another cigarette, which she lit up with a despairing shake of the head, followed by a stagy puff.

“He kept coming here,” Saul said. “To this spot. He’d stand here like a sentry.”

“I know that.” She took a long despairing inhale from the cigarette, as if gasping for oxygen.

“He’d be out in the yard, hour after hour, staring at us, you know.”

“Yes, he told me. He said he was over here.” She paused to reflect. “The gun? You asked about the gun? He found it where I had hidden it.”

“Did he ever tell you why he came over here?”

“No, he didn’t,” she said, rubbing her cheek. She made Saul think of a peeled tangerine. “I was just glad he wanted to do something. That he wanted to go somewhere. I couldn’t look after him.”

“He did it off and on for a whole year.”

“Well, it gave him a place to go.”

“A place to go?”

“Yes. I was at work, and he was old enough not to go to school — said he wasn’t learning anything — and I couldn’t think of anything to do with him, so, you know, he came over here. I guess he thought you cared about him and could maybe give him a place to be.”

“We just got used to it,” Saul said. “To him, ” he corrected himself.

“God-damn,” Brenda suddenly erupted, a high keening wail. “I told and told him about guns, like I was in the NRA or something, and I sure damn well trained him to respect them. I just whacked it into him. You saw me trying to knock some sense into him. Made me feel terrible! If you didn’t hit him, he wouldn’t notice. ‘Guns don’t kill people,’ I told him, ‘people kill people.’ This last time I hid that.22 so no one could find it, in a shoe box.” She looked up, and her face took on a sudden fearful radiance. “No one. But then he did.” The on-the-spot Channel Seven Mobile News van was speeding up the driveway, followed by Channel Three’s news van. Maybe there would be a helicopter and skycam shots, and a direct-feed breaking-news story from the crime scene. Finally, the occasion felt like a movie premiere. Brenda touched her hair. The poor woman — what did she think she was doing, trying to get on television? Attract the talent scouts?

“Miss Bagley?” The police investigator, the detective — Saul was having trouble remembering his name, maybe because of the distraction of the weapons, and each time he saw one of them, the cop looked unfamiliar — took her aside for some questions and a statement and an identification. Saul overheard him asking her about a suicide note. They were certainly interested in suicide notes. Well, responsibility, after all. Cause and effect, after all. A villain, a fall guy. Saul suddenly wondered if maybe — just maybe — there might be one, might be a suicide note. Mentioning him. Barely readable, scrawled, but still scratchily specific. The Channel Seven reporter, whom Saul recognized as Traci McMahoney, hurried away from the mobile news van in a rather purposeful beeline toward him, followed by the camera and sound men. Involuntarily, he stood up straight and cleared his throat.

She was extraordinarily pretty, a small-town former beauty queen probably, with blond hair arranged in an expensive feathery style, startlingly blue eyes, and a strange expression of artificial concern. She was the visual antidote to Brenda Bagley. In spite of himself, Saul felt charged up, on the verge of a statement. Also in spite of himself, he gazed at her as she approached him. She had great legs with excellent calf definition. She worked out somewhere. They all did, now. Guiltily, he turned, looking for his wife. About ten feet away, Patsy had Mary Esther in hand, but Patsy was also checking on Saul. Mary Esther was sobbing quietly. Patsy’s bangs were falling down over her sad eyes as she then hefted Mary Esther from one arm to the other. What was she being sad about? Gordy’s death? That Saul had stared helplessly at the Channel Seven reporter? No. Saul had — they both knew it — a tendency to misstate himself in situations involving the stress of public speaking, so he flashed her his brimful-of-confidence expression; she did not seem immediately reassured.

The other news team, the one from Channel Three, had gone over to wait to interview Brenda until after the detective had finished with her, but this one, the Action News Team from Channel Seven, had stayed here. After Traci McMahoney had set herself up so that the house showed in the background, but before the videocam was rolling, she asked Saul if he’d be willing to answer a few questions on-camera. He nodded. She aimed herself at the lens, touched her hair, and then did her intro. Today, she said, The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy, in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks man, Gordon Himmelman, who lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. The young man had shot himself in the front yard of one of his former teachers, Saul Bernstein. So far there was no explanation as to why he had taken the trouble to bike over to his teacher’s house to shoot himself. No suicide note had yet been found.

Ah, Saul thought. So that settles that.

Traci McMahoney pivoted toward Saul. “You were his teacher.”

“Yes.”

“And in what subject?”

“Language arts.” Saul looked at her and at the microphone, then at the sound guy. He felt something coming on, something wrong. “Last year. Not this academic year. Last academic year. He had dropped out.”

“How were his grades?”

“His grades? It was a. . remedial class.”

“Oh. In that case, how well did you know the young man?”

“Pretty well. I don’t know. How well does anybody know anyone?”

Traci McMahoney frowned. “Had he threatened you? Had he threatened anyone at school?”

“No. Not exactly. He had written those illegible notes of his. He once called me a shitbird.”

Traci McMahoney moved the microphone away from her mouth. Quietly, confidentially, she said to Saul, “We can’t put words like that on the air.”

“I know,” Saul said. “I was just telling you what he said.” His eyebrow itched. He scratched it. “I thought I had just better tell the truth.”

“Okay,” she said, still conspiratorially, sotto voce. Then, resuming her professional voice, she said, “Had he seemed depressed to you?”

“Depressed? No. That wasn’t like him. At least I don’t think so.”

“What about these notes you mentioned?”

“Oh, the notes? He wrote notes in class about how much he didn’t like school. He once called me a kike, but he didn’t really mean it. I don’t even know where he found that word.”

Traci McMahoney shifted her weight on her great legs, expressing impatience and dissatisfaction. She gave off a scent of some wonderful perfume redolent of the Elysian Fields. It made Saul think of Tahiti, where he had never been. Patsy never wore perfume; she had allergies. Brenda’s perfume, by contrast, smelled like the perfume counter in a drugstore. Saul intuited that the interview was not going well, however, and that the fault was probably his. He would try to do better. He wanted to please Traci McMahoney.

“What were you doing when it happened?” she asked.

“I was standing in front of the bedroom window,” Saul said, “listening to my wife tell me about my mother’s affair with the yard boy.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Traci McMahoney said. She dropped the microphone again. “Can we start over? Let’s start over. You don’t need to go into details like that. It’s distracting to the viewers. Let’s start over. And let’s try to stay on-message. This’ll be the second take. This is all on tape anyway. We’ll do some editing. Thank God this isn’t an on-the-air breaking-news report.”

Once again she did an introduction. Today, she said, The Uplands has been a scene of tragedy, in what appears to be a suicide by a Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman. Boy, man. Which was he? This time they ran through the same questions one after the other, but Saul remembered not to mention his mother and not to say anything about shitbirds or kikes.

“Had he threatened anyone else?” she asked.

“Gordy? No. Well, I don’t think so.”

“Do you know where he got the gun?”

“From his aunt, I think. I believe she had hidden it, and he found it.”

“Wouldn’t you consider this a tragedy?”

“Sort of,” Saul said.

“Could you expand on that?”

“Well, I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did. He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them, mindlessly. I don’t know if you could call that a tragedy or not. It just happened. It was. .” Saul struggled to find an adjective. “It was tidal.”

“Wouldn’t you say it’s a tragedy every time a young life is snuffed out?”

“Probably,” Saul said. “Depends on what you mean by ‘tragedy.’” Traci McMahoney frowned again. “If you mean a story of a great man brought low by circumstances related to his character, resulting in events that cause a purging of pity and fear, then no.”

Her frown was growing permanent. “So what you’re saying is, this is another meaningless tragedy, uh, story of violence among our young people.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say it’s meaningless,” Saul told her. “It’s rare for something to be meaningless.”

“Would you care to expand on that?”

“It’s not meaningless if there are guns everywhere. If a weird unhappy kid can get a gun anytime he wants one, then it’s not meaningless. It means that there are too many guns around.”

Traci McMahoney smiled. “Too many guns?”

“This whole country is gun crazy,” Saul said. “From the president on down.”

“Well, you can save that for the Editorial Moment,” Traci McMahoney said, grimacing. “On Sunday night just before sign-off. What about Gordon Himmelman?”

“What about him?”

“Do you feel that you failed him somehow? That the system failed him?”

“Failed him? Me? Who knows? But I doubt it.”

“I mean, do you think you could have stopped him?”

“How?”

“Counseling. More one-on-one. Aggressive intervention. Mentoring.”

“Boys like Gordy Himmelman don’t usually take to counseling. Besides, I wasn’t his parent. He did have this air of abandonment, I’ll say that. He was like the creature set loose by Dr. Frankenstein.” It had come right out of his mouth. He didn’t mean to say it, but he had said it anyway. “You ignore them and they turn into monsters.”

“A monster? No, I won’t follow that up. I could, but I won’t. Is there a chance that this wasn’t a suicide? Could it have been an accident? Why did he come over to your house with a loaded gun?”

“It wasn’t an accident,” Saul said. “He had the gun barrel pointed inside his mouth. Maybe he wanted to impress us.”

There was a long beat during which Traci McMahoney tried to think of a question. “So, in conclusion, why do you think he did it? Do you have an explanation for this terrible trage—,uh, event?”

“Yeah. Too many guns, too much television, not enough reading, a crazy violence-prone culture, and a kid, I mean an okay kid with lousy parenting, probably, or nonparenting, and he needed cognitive help, so you get this dumb bloodfest, this Americana suicide, right? I mean, is there really a big enigma? I don’t see a big enigma here. Maybe the only big enigma is that he didn’t wait to go charging into the school lunch-room next fall spraying bullets. Small favors, and all that. You’ve got to be careful not to sentimentalize when something like this happens.”

“You feel strongly about this,” Traci McMahoney said, in disbelief.

“Yes. I don’t like sentimentality,” Saul said.

“Okay.” She lowered the microphone and nodded at the videocam guy, doing a quick gesture in front of her eyes and a nod indicating a cut. The cameraman lowered the videocam away from his eye before hoisting it backward onto his shoulder, and Saul could see that he was smirking. Then Traci McMahoney turned to Saul once again. “Well, that was mostly unusable. Look,” she said, brilliantly smiling, “I agree with you about a lot of what you said, but you can’t say those things on-camera. That’s editorial-page. That’s not front-page. We’re doing front-page. This is a lead story. You do see the difference.”

“Right.”

“We’re gonna have to do a lot of editing on that. Sorry. You’re kind of a walking outtake.”

“Okay. I was just trying to avoid the usual pieties.”

“The usual pieties. Well, you succeeded. Let me make sure I have this right. You’re Saul Bernstein.” She wrote his name down in a tiny notebook. She licked her lips.

“Yes.”

“Pronounced ‘steen’ or ‘stine’?”

“For TV I don’t care. ‘Steen,’ usually.”

“All right.” She looked up at him, smelling of Tahiti, where he would never go. “You’re very weird.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have said that. I apologize. Really. I apologize to you, profusely. Did I say that? Actually, no, in some sense, I didn’t say that. We’re agreed? All right? I didn’t say that.”

“All right,” Saul said.

“Thank you for your interesting comments.” She turned away. “Where’s the aunt?” she asked. “Is the aunt free, yet?” The cameraman pointed toward Saul and Patsy’s front door, where Brenda was waiting for them to interview her. She had a hand mirror out and was hopelessly fixing her seaweed hair. Everybody was working on the hair today. “Let’s go,” Traci McMahoney said, striding away. “Maybe we can get an aunt segment.”

Saul looked up into the sky as Patsy approached him. He recognized what he was doing as one of Gordy’s habits, staring up into the sky as if something of interest were located there. The day was extremely bright, still beautiful, perhaps, though the sun had disappeared, and no clouds were visible. The sky was like a heat radiator full of steam. “How did I do?” he asked her. Mary Esther was fussy and complaining in Patsy’s arms, and Saul could tell from a pissy odor that her diaper needed changing. She handed Emmy to Saul.

“How did you do?” Patsy leaned back. Saul noticed immediately how much more human she was than Traci McMahoney. Less sexy but more human and more beautiful. Her integrity. Her love for him. Look at her eyes! There was genuine feeling there! “How did you do?” Now she leaned forward. “Honey. Listen to me. A boy killed himself in our yard this morning, and now, at eight minutes before five o’clock, you’re asking me how you did? I should hit you. Or something. I don’t mean for that woman and the way that you. .”

She couldn’t finish the sentence, because at that moment, which was also a future moment, and a past one as well — time had become indelibly confused somehow — Saul felt himself hit or nudged. Looking up at the upstairs window of his house, he saw (and didn’t see) himself, and Patsy, the two of them naked there, with Mary Esther in Patsy’s arms. He — the Saul of the here and now — was standing where Gordy had been, on the spot where the boy had stood. He did not break out into sobs. No, he wasn’t even crying; no cathartic moment presented itself. After all, it had been a small death, and it was not, in any sense, a tragedy, as he had carefully noted. But it was still a death. And something precious to Saul — he couldn’t even say what it was, and he prided himself on his occasional sensitivities — something precious to him felt, what was the word, trashed. And for that, and maybe even for Gordy Himmelman with a bullet hole at the back of his skull and his blood on the tree in the yard, his body carted away under a sheet, for all those things. . what was the word, those things unloved, a boy who in a single moment hadn’t wanted to live anymore, Saul felt suddenly like an accomplice, even though the expression on his face did not change, and Patsy leaned forward toward him, making an arc over their crying daughter, in common grief.

Ten

After the officers of the law had returned with their notebooks and clipboards to their patrol cars, and after the Action News vans had sped away to the next news site, and after the two reporters from the Five Oaks News-Chronicle had departed, taking the young staff photographer with the shaved head with them, and after the superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, had called to schedule what he called a “strategy session” with Saul for the following week, maybe Tuesday, Saul and Patsy sat in their living room, wondering what would hit them next. They had taken the phone off the hook. Mary Esther toyed with her Busy Box in the playpen, and when she stood and whined (she could stand on her own now and would soon be in the toddler stage; her first words had already been said), Saul took her up to her bedroom. Patsy could hear him singing to her.

Patsy didn’t want to be alone with Saul for the rest of the evening. She dreaded that prospect.

Hurriedly, she called Harold, Saul’s friend, who said he would be over in a matter of minutes, with his wife, Agatha. After putting the phone down and consulting her address book, Patsy called her friend from the bank, in the loan office, Susan. She and Susan were both loan officers in different branches in town. Susan said yes, of course, she would drop everything. She said she didn’t think she could bring her husband, Wyatt. Wyatt was working on the city budget. Then Patsy called Mad Dog Bettermine and the woman he lived with, Karla, and after they agreed to come, she invited another friend, Julie Dusenberg, an instructor in English at Holbein College whom Saul and Patsy had met at a day-care center in town. Julie was a single mom, and she said she’d be over in a jiffy as long as it was okay with them if she brought her daughter, Kate, with her, and as long as it was okay if she didn’t stay until late. Patsy then called Laurie Welsh. Laurie couldn’t come because of the kids — Hugh was gone, Laurie didn’t say where, though Patsy guessed he was probably out drinking — but asked if there was anything else she could do. She had already heard about Gordy Himmelman’s suicide. She wanted to be there for her. Before Patsy could say anything, Laurie said she’d bring some cooked chicken by tomorrow, would she be around at ten in the morning?

Still in a nervous rush, Patsy called two high school teachers, the Krolls, Rosanne and Hank. She called Gary Krochock, their funny and embittered divorced single neighbor and insurance agent. They all said that they would drop by. Then, like someone who has been on a binge, she stopped herself.

By the time Saul came back down the stairs, five of their friends were already sitting in the living room, waiting for him, and Patsy knew, just from the look on his face, that he understood why she had invited them, and understood why they were there.

Saul went into the kitchen to bring in the beer, but several of the guests had brought their own and had already opened theirs. When he came back out, the death party, such as it was, had ground to a standstill; an expressive air pocket of dead silence greeted him.

Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was oddly muted, mumbling. It’s a desert in here, Patsy thought, as Saul handed out more beer to his friends. Gordy Himmelman had died storyless. Mad Dog and Karla and Saul had all taught him, but he had drifted invisibly, sullenly, into their classrooms and out again. Harold, the barber, had cut the boy’s hair and had known Gordy’s mother, once upon a time, but he had no stories about her son. No, he hadn’t been a good athlete; no, he didn’t have a good sense of humor; and, no, he wasn’t especially kind or considerate. The one really memorable action he had performed in his life, the one thing that everybody would remember about him and say about him as long as they remembered him or talked about him was that he had shot himself.

Saul and Patsy told the story of how they had stood before the window when it had happened. They told the story of the reporter from Channel Seven, Traci McMahoney.

Julie Dusenberg, the English instructor, hoisting her sleepy daughter, Kate, to her left breast, said it was like a case study. The whole event was like a case study.

“A case study of what?” Hank Kroll asked.

“I don’t know,” Julie Dusenberg said dispiritedly. “A case study of something. Of our time,” she said, finally, in desperation, “that you could deconstruct.”

“Well, it’s already deconstructed,” Gary Krochock said, from where he was stretched out on the floor. He was wearing a University of Oklahoma sweatshirt and was balancing his beer bottle on his stomach. “If it’s in the morgue, it’s completely deconstructed, if you want my opinion. It doesn’t get more deconstructed than that. By the way, did you know that ‘disarticulation’ is a medical term? It means taking the body apart, limb by limb.”

“Don’t tell me that this is going to turn into a discussion of American youth,” Mad Dog said, from his end of the sofa, peering with one eye into his empty beer bottle, “because if this turns into a discussion of American youth, I’m going home right now, no questions asked.” He gave off a slight air of pre-drunkenness. “I don’t want to hear about any of that.”

“But the boy’s dead,” Karla said to him. Karla, Saul noted, was the sexiest woman he had ever known who was not beautiful. She looked like a minor player in a porno movie. “Can’t anyone say anything good about him?”

“No,” Mad Dog said. “And I knew him.” He sat there. “Wait a minute. I thought of something. He made good paper airplanes.”

“But he’s a human soul,” Karla said, slapping him on the arm. “Where’s your charity?”

“Where it belongs,” Mad Dog said. “With you. With us.”

“Poor kid, anyway,” someone half-whispered. “Poor old kid, anyway.”

Susan Palmer all at once spoke up. “I don’t see why we have to feel bad. Patsy? You shouldn’t be feeling all guilty and everything. He wasn’t a charming orphan. He didn’t have asthma. He didn’t run away and then come home again, reformed like the prodigal whatever. He wrote semi-illiterate threatening notes, threatening our friends, and let’s face it, he was a big stinking mess. He destroyed Saul’s beehives, when you lived over there. It’s lucky he didn’t hurt Mary Esther. He came into their front yard and waved a gun around, and he sort of harassed them, and I agree, it’s a trauma, but I don’t see what obligation we have to be sentimental about some little shit.” She waited. “I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away.”

A long silence followed, interrupted by the sounds of beer pouring into mouths. Mad Dog suppressed a belch. Someone — Patsy thought maybe it was Rosanne, who almost never spoke — said, “So what you’re saying is, good riddance.”

“Did I say that?” Susan Palmer asked. “No. I don’t believe I said that.”

Another air pocket of silence opened up. Finally, the insurance agent, Gary Krochock, said, “I’ve got to tell you guys about this dream I had last night. Since we’re talking about the dead and everything. It was extremely weird. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”

“You did what?” Saul asked.

“I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat. We were in this big room, maybe it was a recording studio, which I don’t know much about because I’ve never been in one, but I know there were microphones, and Sinatra is out of the room, but he’s left his hat upside down on the floor. And because I had to take a pee, I pissed into it. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”

“What did he say?”

“Frank? He didn’t say anything. He was out of the room. But I got scared, and I woke up,” Gary Krochock said. He was still stretched out on the floor. “I’m in big trouble now. I’m in a world of trouble.”

“Frank Sinatra is dead,” Patsy said. “You’re beyond harm.”

“No, but see, that’s the difference. The Chairman of the Board is powerful even in death. That’s why I’m telling you this. He has not lost his influence. He has friends here and there. He’s going to be very, very angry that I pissed into his hat. I don’t feel that I’m safe anymore. Frank Sinatra — well, there’s someone you don’t want to have for an enemy, especially in the afterlife.”

“Take out a policy on yourself,” Mad Dog suggested.

“Too late,” the insurance agent said. “Preexisting condition.”

“What time is it?” Julie Dusenberg asked. “I probably have to go.”

“Two minutes before eleven,” Patsy said without looking at her watch.

“Turn on the news,” Agatha, Harold’s wife, said. “Saul’ll be on.”

Harold reached down for the remote on the coffee table in front of him, pressed a button, and the TV sprang to appliance-life with a miscellany of hisses and crackles.

“Channel Seven,” Saul said.

They watched an ad for Bruckner Buick, some sort of midsummer clearance sale on sedans and SUVs. Then they waited through an ad for a local house-and-garden store until at last the news, preceded by a brass fanfare, came on, with the tease headline, “Local boy dies in schoolteacher’s front yard.” Dennis Peterson, the local anchor for Channel Seven, appeared behind the news desk, his toupee a fraction of an inch off-center, and he gazed solemnly at the lens, the way he always did when he had a major story to report. “A shocking event in Five Oaks today,” he began, in his baritone voice.

“He has a big ole head,” Gary Krochock said, of Dennis Peterson. “He looks like a goddamn pedophile.”

“Why can’t they use complete sentences?” Saul asked. “Not even Tom Brokaw uses complete sentences anymore.”

Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was watching the screen, Patsy noticed. Dennis Peterson continued. “A seventeen-year-old Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman, died by his own hand this morning with a single gunshot to the head. The handgun used in the suicide belonged to the victim’s aunt, and the young man had stolen it from her. The death occurred on Whitefeather Road, in the front yard of Five Oaks high school teacher Saul Bernstein. We do not yet know why the boy had bicycled to his teacher’s house to end his life, and there are still conflicting theories and many unanswered questions about this shocking event. We have a full report by Traci McMahoney.”

“I used to teach in the high school,” Saul said quickly. “I don’t know what I do now.”

“You should be making a tape of this,” Harold muttered to Patsy. “You may need it.”

“You think so?” Patsy asked.

“That’s right, Denny,” Traci McMahoney said. She was also seated at the news desk in the studio. Patsy noticed that she was wearing a different outfit from the one she was wearing earlier this afternoon. “Tonight,” she said, “we have many more questions than answers about the tragic death of Five Oaks high schooler Gordon Himmelman.”

There was a cut to an establishing shot of Saul and Patsy’s brand-new house on Whitefeather Road, at The Uplands. Traci McMahoney’s commentary continued in a voice-over as the screen presented more shots of the house, the lawn, and finally the tree, viewed from a back-angle so that the bloodstains didn’t show. “The scene of the death was this quiet front yard in a residential area near the Wolverine Outlet Mall. The young man, Gordon Himmelman, lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. He was a troubled student, challenged academically in high school, currently a dropout, and a former member of the Cub Scouts. His mother had died several years ago in a house fire, and the boy, according to those who knew him, was known for his sense of humor and his pranks.”

“What? Cub Scouts?” Saul asked the TV. “Pranks?”

“The boy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, filled us in on some details.”

“Where’s Saul?” Gary Krochock asked from the floor. “I want to see Saul.”

The screen cut to a close-up of Gordy’s aunt. She was smiling but the smile was stoic and unconvincing. “My nephew was a wonderful boy,” she said. “Just wonderful. He didn’t have a care in the world. He could get into scrapes, okay, but this is what he was, and what he wasn’t, well, I don’t know, because this thing doesn’t make any sense, this tragedy that he did, to himself, with the gun he found that I had hidden, there’s two and two. I can’t put it together, two and two that just don’t add up. It’s still just two and two.”

“Boy, is she ugly,” Gary Krochock said. “A poltroon. She looks like someone slid into her face at second base. With cleats on.”

“That’s an awful thing to say,” Julie Dusenberg said, turning around to look. “She’s just scared.”

“And what of Gordon Himmelman’s teacher?” Traci McMahoney asked, on a voice-over again, with a medium shot on the tape of Saul looking perplexed, standing next to Patsy. “Saul Bernsteen? When we asked him for some reaction, he seemed as baffled as the victim’s aunt.”

“Hey,” Saul said. “I wasn’t baffled.”

Suddenly there was a close-up of Saul. People in Saul and Patsy’s living room started to clap. The others shushed them. “I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did,” Saul said onscreen into the microphone. “He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them.”

The camera cut back to Traci McMahoney, and then to a shot of Garfield-Fraser Middle School, where the principal was being interviewed about school violence. “Where’s the rest of me?” Saul cried.

“The police have searched for a suicide note but have so far turned up nothing to give them any insight to this terrible event,” Traci McMahoney said. “So far, we have no clues as to why the armed boy bicycled over to his teacher’s house, and we have no clues, either, concerning the motivations for his tragic suicide. The only person who had the answers to these questions cannot give us one. In an age of violence in our schools, there may in fact be no easy explanations. Those who are left grieving must still wonder over the causes tonight. Perhaps the only blessing is that this happened during the summer, during school vacation, so that Gordon Himmelman’s school friends can have time before classes begin to mourn his loss. Reporting from Whitefeather Road, this is Traci McMahoney.”

“That was totally insane,” Harold said, shaking his head and looking away from the TV screen. “Jesus. That thing about summer vacation. What the fuck was that about?”

“Maybe it just slipped out,” Saul said. Dennis Peterson had segued to another story about Derby Days in downtown Five Oaks, and then the phone started to ring.

“I thought you looked pretty good, Saul,” Karla said. “You acquitted yourself very well.” She clapped her hands several times in his direction, a form of applause. A few other people in the room also applauded. “Hear, hear,” they said.

The party broke up half an hour later.

At two-fifteen, Saul was lying in bed with Patsy. “I can’t sleep,” he said.

“I know.” She opened and shut her mouth quickly, realized that the nighttime epigram she was about to utter was not particularly clever, and was in the wrong key, besides.

They lay there together. It was a warm night, and they touched each other lightly, back to back.

“Do you feel it?” Saul asked. “He hasn’t gone away.”

“What do you mean?”

Saul looked up toward the ceiling in exasperation. “He’s still here,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”

Yes, of course she could tell. Yes, indeed. He still was. It would take more than a bullet to put an end to him, but she would be careful not to say so.

Eleven

A day begins, sunny, the hint of a breeze, a relief from the stillness of the day before. The baby — really, her infancy is over, and the world is registering on her in complex patterns of light and sound — the baby is standing in her crib uttering greet-the-world noises, vocalizations. She practices her scat-singing. In the bedroom across the hall, her parents ponder the possibility of making love — the husband, who has not slept, staring at the ceiling, and the wife, who has slept very well indeed but who has a headache from a beer she drank just before she went to bed, studying the bedside clock, though she already knows the time. The encounter, if it happens, would be quick. This does not have to be said. No profound emotions would be exchanged, no virtuoso gestures; it would be like coughing: a relief for the moment, an analgesic against other urges and irritations. But after one or two tentative caresses on the arm, the back, the buttocks, they move away from each other. The spaces between them could be measured in millimeters, infinitesimal spaces expressing an inexpressible failure of desire. Neither one wants to hurt the other’s feelings, and they both take great care to be physically tactful. Arising out of the drudgery of sleep, the wife (Patsy) is preoccupied with her dreams, her daughter in the next room, and a slight and casual indifference to her husband’s body, an indifference that is new to her, and the husband (Saul) is preoccupied with death. He is, to use an antique word, heartsick. Morning sex will not cure it. Sex, today, would make it worse.

The measure of this particular marriage is that each one knows the other’s thoughts. Day after day, the possibility of a private language between them is established and maintained. No private language, the wife thinks, no marriage.

The wife tosses aside the sheet and marches into the bathroom. She splashes water on her face. Then she brushes her teeth, enjoying the taste, like candied goo, of the toothpaste, a sunrise taste. After rinsing her mouth out and watching the water swirl down the drain that is beginning to be clogged with her husband’s beard stubble, she searches in the medicine cabinet for the aspirin, pushing aside the antidepressants to get at it. She takes two caplets, then lowers her cupped hands to the running water. As she drinks the water, she notices that her toenails will soon need clipping. She looks at her face in the mirror and thinks of the word “haggard,” because that is what she expected to be but is not. She looks pretty great, all things considered. Her eyes glow with intelligence and clarity, the dream-life and the headache fading out of them now that she is standing up. Her beauty — and she can recognize this — originates from her eyes. It flows out from there. The rest of her body is secondary, a problem in geometry, a dancer’s problem.

Back in the bedroom, she stretches her clasped arms and twists her head back and forth to loosen the neck muscles. She lowers herself to the floor to perform her leg-raises, sit-ups, and more stretch exercises before she stands and walks over to the phone. She calls a special number at the bank to say she will not be coming in to work. Family emergency. Of course everyone at the bank will already know about Gordy Himmelman’s death. In fact, the secretary to whom she speaks passes on her sympathies. Patsy hardly needs to call. After hanging up, she pads into the nursery to greet Mary Esther, nuzzle her, change her, and take her down to the kitchen for breakfast. Her daughter screech-sings happily when she first sees her mother.

As Patsy’s mother used to say, following any event contaminated by sorrow, “Life goes on.”

The husband hears his wife’s light footsteps as she descends the stairs. Before he rises, he leans over to sniff her pillow to detect her mood. The smell on the pillow is businesslike, a female version of getting-on-with-things. How does he know this, how does he know he isn’t imagining, right there on the borders of psychopathology, his wife’s climates and thoughts? He shrugs to himself. He just does. He’s married to her. Slowly he pushes the sheet aside and stands up. He lumbers with effort — he feels like a circus bear — past the dresser, festooned with framed pictures of his daughter, past the rickety wooden chair on which he throws his clothes at night. He ambles in front of the window, pushes aside the curtains, and raises the windowshade. He lingers there, idly rearranging his penis inside his pajamas as he looks out at the linden tree and the lawn.

From the kitchen he hears his wife and daughter making noises. The wife is weaning the daughter, a difficult process for both of them. Food is being spooned into the daughter’s mouth, and this same food, projectile-spat, has appeared on the floor and the high chair. The husband at the window notices that his early-morning thoughts are in the passive voice. He is permitted to use the passive voice when he is sleepy.

The boy, Gordy Himmelman, is not there, outside, but he shoots himself anyway, randomly, airily, imaginatively, bringing himself back so that he can go away again. There he is, and isn’t, now, pointing the gun into himself and firing. Insubstantial bits of brains and skull fly up against the bark of the linden tree. How calm it is. How it goes on, destruction, into its own afterlife. Still, this life, his own, Saul’s, must be lived somehow. Saul shuffles into the bathroom for his shower, rubbing his eyes violently with the flat of his hand.

Under the cascading hot water, he cleans himself dutifully, dragging the washcloth layered with the antibacterial gold soap across his chest and arms and face, and at first his mind is pleasingly blank, until he thinks haphazardly, first of Gordy Himmelman, then of his mother and her teenaged boyfriend. He considers them as he washes his arms, doing his best to set up police crime-scene yellow tape around his imaginings, exiling them, forgetting them, ignoring them. It is like trying to ignore the enraged African elephant charging toward its victim. The unconscious never takes a vacation. Despite his regrets about the matter, his mother is a passionate woman. Gordy Himmelman, his mother—what choice does anyone have in the thoughts he is given to think? Still, he feels shame-soiled. He rinses himself off, pulls aside the shower curtain, and grabs a towel. This morning he will not bother to shave. Let the Saul-face be unfinished today.

In the kitchen, the phone is still off the hook, the hand-piece dangling down on its stretched coil wire from the wall-mounted phone to the floor. His daughter in her yellow-backed high chair with the teddy-bear headrest sits contentedly surrounded by the spatterings of breakfast, and she smiles when her father enters the room. “Hi, Princess,” he says, kissing her on the top of her head. Her hair is so delicate and fine, smelling of stardust and spun gold, Saul feels a sensual pleasure touching his lips to it.

She is so extravagantly new. Half of her is from him. The other half is from his wife. But the half and half add up to something entirely original. The husband remembers to kiss his wife also on the top of her head. “Good morning, Patsy,” he says to the woman he neglected to make love to half an hour earlier. For just a moment, he touches the tip of his tongue to her hair. She lifts her face to him, a smear of food on her cheek. “Oh, yes. Good morning, sweetheart,” she replies. She gives off a faint scent of dry saltine crackers and milk. The smile she has for him is quick, as is the kiss she gives him. “I love you,” she says, and after her husband tells her he loves her, he cleans her cheek with his index finger before sitting down at the table in front of the coffee cup she has placed there for him (cream, no sugar). Wearing a T-shirt and his pajama bottoms, he opens the paper. Perhaps it will be an ordinary day after all the extraordinariness of the previous day.

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.”

“I don’t know about the anti-Semitism part,” Saul says. He stops what he is doing to rub his scalp. Mary Esther sits down abruptly, experimentally, on the floor. Patsy sits down next to the two of them. “He was human, Patsy, carbon-based just like ourselves, and he wasn’t an anti-Semite, because that was too complicated for him. He was here, and then he was here, and then he was here again and again and again full of that negative energy of his, and now he’s gone, but he’s still here, and the thing is, they don’t go away unless you grieve them.” After turning around, he runs his hands tenderly through her hair. “And even then sometimes they don’t. Oh, Patsy. You are so beautiful. I know I keep saying that, but it’s true.”

She smiles at his compliment as if he means it. He’s only saying it, however, because they didn’t make love and this is a reparation. “See, I don’t think that’s it,” she tells him, still smiling. “This is where grieving shades over into the morbid.”

“Morbid? Patsy,” he says, “all this happened yesterday. He killed himself yesterday morning. God forgive us, we had a party last night. Morbid goes on and on. Morbid is for years. He hasn’t even had twenty-four hours to be dead in. One day, is all I’m saying. Give me one day. He would have given us one day.” Saul stops. He does not know what he meant by his last sentence.

“Okay, right. But you’re treating him as if he was somebody, Saul. He wasn’t.”

“Oh, he wasn’t?”

“Nope. He wasn’t anybody much at all. It’s just sentimental to say he was somebody. That’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’ve been talking about all this time. Sentimentality.”

The word hangs in the air, radiating its contempt, Saul thinks, for himself. In order to protect himself, Saul thinks: The word despises me, but it got loose from Patsy, who could not have meant it.

After taking off her slippers, he begins to massage her feet. He has always had a thing for her feet, which are slender but strong. He addresses the Patsy he loves, not the Patsy who just used the word “sentimentality” against him. “Well, I think he was somebody. I don’t know what kind of somebody he was, and I don’t think anybody knew, but he was that, at least. On the list where it says ‘Somebody,’ Gordy Himmelman gets included.”

“Saul,” she says, leaning back and closing her eyes as he massages her, “wake up. We’re in contemporary times now. And the kids they’re making, Saul, I’m telling you, the kids they’ve got in the schools, they’re not somebody anymore.” Lowering her gaze, she gives him her perfectly reasonable smile and her voice-of-realism voice. Somebody around here, she thinks, has to save Saul from his errant compassion; it endangers their family.

“They’re not?”

“No, honey, they aren’t. I hate to say it, but it’s true. They’re facsimiles, these kids, American-made humanoids. All-American McHumans. Why d’you think they call them zombies? This is why the nations rage against us. This whole country has a robot-thing going with its kids. Jesus Christ, you’re being mushy. These kids aren’t anybody! If they were, they wouldn’t call you on the phone or come into the front yard and then shoot themselves for no purpose at all in the world.” She waits. “They’d have a reason.”

“Well, if he wasn’t anybody, Patsy, then it’s perfectly all right for him to kill himself.” He smiles winsomely, a counterattack smile to her previous smile.

“That’s not what I’m saying,” she says, her voice going metallic.

“And . . if he’s not human, it’s all right for someone else to kill him. If he’s nobody, then anybody can kill him, legally, you know? And all the nonhuman kids like him.”

“Saul, you’re deliberately misrepresenting me.”

“And if these kids aren’t human, then who is? Who gets a right to be human? The dopes? The droolers? The ones who slur their words and live under bridges with the bums and the trolls? The Gypsies? The Jews? The Arabs? The Mormons? Who gets to be human? Who gets to live? Show me the qualifications, Patsy, since you’re such a goddamn expert on what it is to be human.”

“All right, all right, all right,” she says, shrugging, horrified by his sudden rage. “I see your point. Okay, okay.”

“I’m going to take a nap,” he says, but he stays right where he is, unmoving. “I’m tired.”

At ten minutes past three o’clock in the afternoon, Saul is still in his pajamas. Patsy has never seen him stay in his pajamas all afternoon except when he. . no, she has never seen it. Mary Esther is upstairs napping after having crawled all over her father, and Saul now has the parts of a broken cuckoo clock out on the floor. He pretends to repair the little bellows for the cuckoo’s call. Perhaps he is actually repairing it. Mostly he just wool-gathers over there. He has the Brahms Clarinet Quintet on the audio system, always a bad sign — incipient, dangerous, and highly contagious lyrical melancholia, melancholy warbling its autumnal song as if that were the only song there ever was or could be, and Saul, her husband, singing right along with it, every scarily beautiful phrase, music like a virus, infecting the listener with lethal sadness.

And now Patsy hears a car coming up the driveway, and the phone ringing simultaneously. The phone, that teething baby, has been ringing whenever she places the receiver back on the hook. One friend after another, including Harold the barber, offering consolation and help. Out front, the car has stopped. Rushing past the spider plant, Patsy quickly answers the phone, to a voice that says, “Hi, Mrs. Bernstein? Is your Jew husband there?” before she hangs up. Then, quickly, she approaches the door, where Gordy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, has carried a large box from her car’s trunk and dropped it on the front stoop.

“Ms. Bagley,” Patsy says, shading her eyes against the afternoon sun.

“Well, hi there,” Gordy’s aunt says, tipping her head in what seems at first to be an ironic bow. But the bow isn’t ironic; shyness or anxiety or sheer confusion propel it. Her face, pockmarked and roughened, has a cigarette with a long ash apparently growing out of the side of the mouth. Brenda Bagley projects, in all directions, an energetic look of savage desperation.

She puts her hand, now with the cigarette, to her forehead while she clears her throat, and the hot coal tip comes dangerously close to her hairline. The ash falls gracefully to the stoop. Patsy watches it fall.

“I had to come over here. I’ve felt so bad, and I expect you have, too. Last night I couldn’t sleep, of course. Poor worthless kid, how I miss him. You ever miss a poor worthless kid? I tried calling first but the lines were all busy. So I thought I’d just get in the car and drive past.” She has tried to give her hair a few new curls, as if she knows she will be in the public eye. People will be judging her appearance. Her misapplied drugstore lipstick adds to the general overdetermined effect. She looks like a witch in a fairy tale with a poisoned candy house. Behind the house are frogs in a pen. Seeing Brenda Bagley’s efforts to beautify herself, Patsy has to force back — what are these? — yes: tears. The pathos of Brenda’s unattractiveness gives the woman an insidious power. Against her, Patsy feels all her defenses fading. Ah, Patsy thinks, here is a real expert in unhappiness. Here is the tenured full professor of suffering.

Patsy asks her if she’d like to come in. Please, Patsy adds. Gordy’s aunt shakes her head, exhaling smoke as if her heart were a furnace. “No, I couldn’t do that to you. Not invited, like I am. What awful times,” she says. “I’m just so broken up, I don’t know what to do with myself. Like I say, I’m not company for you or anyone. What I thought was, I should come over here with a gift, this gift box of his things that I gathered from his closet this morning. It’s what I thought of last night, when I couldn’t sleep.”

“A box?”

“Right. I thought you and your husband would want some of the boy’s clothing, your husband being Gordy’s teacher and all, and considering what happened over here. Gordy had his feelings about you both. He just couldn’t stay away. Never did tell me why.” Something about her facial expression does not match what she is saying; her glance has become shrewd and inquisitorial, almost gleefully full of hatred. She is a woman who knows how to exploit her unattractiveness and unhappiness. She has all the considerable resources of the weak: the rags, the incompetence when dealing with catastrophe, the unendurable face, the incorrect tone, the addictions, the cluelessness, the echoing footsteps out of the ravaged town.

For a moment what Gordy’s aunt has said does not register on Patsy at all. Then it does. “What feelings were those? And you mean to say,” pointing at the box, “those are Gordy’s clothes?”

“Not all the clothes he owned. Just some of them. That’s what I’m telling you,” Brenda says, repeating her confusing ironic bow, a failed gesture of respect, followed by a long inhale. Brenda’s eyes are watering now, and the grief no longer seems to be feigned, though perhaps the tears simply follow the irritating effect of the smoke. Patsy wonders what her grief is based on, if that’s what it is, and where she gets it from. How does a person mourn someone like Gordy Himmelman? Out of what tenderness could it possibly arise? You don’t tear your hair and beat your breast after the demise of a kid like that. Do you? Some questions she does not dare to ask.

And now Saul in his pajamas appears behind Patsy, carrying the cuckoo clock bellows in his left hand. He squeezes it, and a cuckoo’s call rises from his fingers. Life, Patsy thinks, is more dreamlike than any dream. “You’re in your pajamas,” Brenda says. “You sick?”

“Yes,” Saul says without interest. “I am. You?”

“No, not me, not yet. Okay, I’ll stay away from you. Right here is my distance. Well, like I was saying to your wife there, those’re some of his clothes.” She points down to the box, before she pulls up the top flap and reaches in. “A few of his shirts, and a couple pair of pants, and socks. I would like for you to have them.” She lifts up a pair of blue jeans for display. Ash from her cigarette falls on them. “A remembrance gift.” Dark stains decorate the jeans where the ash has not touched them.

“We can’t take them,” Saul says. “They’re Gordy’s.”

“Not anymore, they ain’t. Sure, you can take them. He was right about your size.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, I’m certainly not taking them back,” she says with sudden coldness. “You can do with them what you want, you and your wife, give them away to Goodwill if that’s what you’d like to do, use them as rags. Don’t even have to bring them into the house if you don’t want to, leave ’em out here. I just can’t keep them around,” she barks out, almost as a scream. “But,” she then says, taking a deep breath as if to compose herself, “now that’s taken care of, there’s another thing I was having to ask you about, on a related matter. I haven’t seen the boy’s father in a couple years. Maybe you know. I tried him in Wyoming and then in Colorado. They never heard of him in either place. I’ve tried everywhere. Police have, too. Vanished from the face of the earth, Rufus has. God, that man was a pure worthless piece of worthlessness. Oh, well. There’s the matter of the expense related to the cremation, and now I’ve got to take care of that by myself as the next of kin.” She peers around Patsy toward Saul, in his pajamas. “And I just can’t.”

“I think I understand,” Saul says. “You want some financial help.” Patsy feels herself physically leaving this scene. She is not going to be here. Let Saul take care of it, she thinks, the money. Let him be the Last American Humanist. Let him exercise his compassion. That’s his sideline. He’s good at that. But she is not going to let him spend their money, including the portion that she herself has earned. Not here. Not now.

“Not in so many words,” Gordy’s aunt says, putting the soiled blue jeans back into the box, after carefully folding them. “What I’m asking is whether you can help out. A contribution. It’s not like we can start a community-wide fund for him. People don’t care for a suicide. That’s not a cause they empty their pockets for.”

“How much?” Saul asks, glancing at Patsy, who seems to be gazing off at the horizon, having somehow managed strategically to space out. She doesn’t seem to be here anymore. No help from her, the professional loan officer. Not a dime for the dead boy’s tribute.

“Whatever you can spare,” Brenda half-whispers. “For the cremation. Or the box?”

“All right,” he whispers back, in sympathy. “You take a check?”

“Whatever you can spare,” Brenda repeats, her eyes filling with tears. “For that poor boy.”

“Make sure it’s your checkbook, honey,” Patsy says, awakening. “Not the joint one.”

“Whatever you can spare. For that poor boy,” Patsy imitates late that night, in the living room. She needs to be callous. A bit of insensitivity allows her to breathe. She feels, and has for most of the afternoon, as if she had been fitted with a whalebone corset. She needs the relief of standoffishness from the harms that pity leaves on her spirit. “Good god, what a performance. And this is—”

“They’re not even going to have a funeral, Patsy. They just need a box or something to bury Gordy in. That’s all.”

“Listen to me.” They’re both sitting on the floor, surrounded by a heap of soiled Gordy-clothing. There are clothes for warm and cold seasons. Flannel shirts, underwear, socks, jeans, corduroys — a mess of dirty stinking fraying fabrics. During the summer the boy had carried with him an odor of hay and old cheese. As the weather turned colder, his aromas mutated and became furry. The December-and-January Gordy had given off the scent of the dogs he probably slept with, and here were the clothes from those months, smelling as if they had come straight from the Humane Society.

She has raised her hand to his shoulder. It rests there a moment and then rises to his face. “You’re not guilty of anything, sweetie. You did nothing wrong. And what happened yesterday here was shocking, and we have every right to be shocked. . ”

“Oh, do you think so?” Saul asks. “I think that adults aren’t shocked. They pretend to be shocked, but they aren’t, not really. It’s a pose.”

“You weren’t shocked? What would it have taken yesterday to shock you?”

“Something else. I wasn’t shocked,” Saul insists, running his hands through the pockets of Gordy Himmelman’s trousers. “What were we expecting all those months, anyway? That he would eventually go away? We had gotten accustomed to him. No, yesterday I felt something else.”

“Okay.”

He searches her face before speaking. “Oh, I felt surprise, maybe, but that’s different. Here’s a dopey kid whose aunt has a gun and who stands and stands in our front yard without ever telling us what he wanted from us. And, by the way, why were you shocked? You’re the person who worked up the conviction that he was not like us, a nonhuman. That’s the height of sophistication, if you ask me, calling him a nonperson. That was really worldly of you. That was positively European.”

“Okay, Saul,” Patsy says. “Before we have a real fight, let me ask you a question. Between grief and indifference, what is there? There isn’t anything. Show me the typical half-sob and maybe I’ll sort of believe you.”

“Actually, it’s called sadness, Patsy. In English, that’s the word they have available between grief and indifference. And someday I’ll show you a half-sob. Just not now.” He puts his hands inside another pair of the boy’s pockets and removes some small torn bits of paper. “Hey, Patsy, you just don’t feel it. Modest grief is not there for you. You’re more a creature of black and white. What’s this?”

The papers are nested, one inside the other, like puzzle parts. They seem to have been sections of a larger sheet of paper that has been ripped inexpertly. Saul puts them down on the floor in an attempt to reassemble them, five small pieces that together form a blue-lined page of school notebook paper, three punched holes on the left side. Outdoors, the wind starts up, and the lights flicker, but only for a moment. The papers tremble on the floor. They appear to be animated by the breathing of the world soul. Something is scrawled on them, and Saul bends down to make out the phrases, Gordy’s modest scrawled leavings.

She did it

they toad the car

mad in america!!!!

“I taught him to write, so he could write this,” Saul says. “I taught him language, so he could curse. I wonder what this ‘she did it’ business is all about.” He turns the papers over and reassembles them. On the reverse side there are only four words.

no fear

exxxtrabila

tyemeszeemer

“Oh, right. No fear.” Saul shrugs. “And ‘exxxtrabila’—where d’you suppose he learned that word?”

The now-working cuckoo clock ticks from the wall. Patsy looks at the paper. “From the other polyglots, that’s who. He watched a lot of TV. No real clues here, though,” she says. “The kid didn’t have a lick of sense.”

“You know what I think?” Saul asks. His face takes on an animated stare. “I think the aunt was abusing him. That Brenda Bagley woman. That’s what ‘she did it’ means. She was abusing him. So he shot himself. Mystery solved.”

“Come on, Saul. Let’s not do the abuse narrative.” Just then, the phone rings. It is the twentieth call of the day, probably another kind friend offering help. Saul gets up to answer it.

“Hi,” the voice says. “It’s Gordy. How’re you doin’?” The voice does not sound at all like Gordy but like a grown man imitating a boy.

“Just fine, Gordy,” Saul replies. “And how’re you?”

“You’re lying,” the voice says. “You’re not fine at all.”

“This isn’t Gordy. Who am I talking to? Who is this?”

“Yes, it is. I just learned German. They teach all the dead buggers German. It’s the universal language back here. You have to learn German in the afterlife. Didn’t you know that? You can learn it here in a few hours.” The voice laughs, with its bizarre inflections. “It’s real easy learning German when you’re dead because it’s like a mind-thing that happens. It’s like boom, and then you speak it. See, German solved all my problems.” The speaker is laughing heartily. “You’ll learn it, too, when you’re dead. Which could be any time now.”

Ah, Saul thinks, a militia guy, a trailer-park fascist.

“You know,” Saul says, “it’s late, my man, and I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I think I’ll hang up on you now.”

“Don’t you hang up on me, you fucking Jew. With that boy’s blood on your dirty Jew hands, you—”

“Wow,” Saul says, putting the receiver down. “Wow, wow, wow.” He stands for a moment, trying to find some object on which to rest his gaze. At last he sees Patsy and studies her. His hand is trembling with anger. “Maybe,” he says, “we should get a gun ourselves.”

“Shocked?” Patsy asks, gazing back at him.

Late that night Patsy discovers that she is alone in bed. When her legs sweep across the sheeted mattress, nothing meets them but cotton and air. Where is Saul this time? An unpleasant, ill-meaning summer wind blows against the house, causing the bedsheet to ruffle and the Chapstick to roll off Saul’s dresser. On the wall, the photograph of Patsy’s parents trembles in time to the rattles of the windowframes. Nothing in this house seems to be built solidly, to be able to withstand the onrushes of fate and wind, except Patsy. Saul has a tendency to be blown over, wherever he is. Where is he?

Walking down the hall past Mary Esther’s room, she finds him hunched over in the spare bedroom. He is bent over his desk. Grit touches the bottoms of Patsy’s bare feet. When she glances down, she sees that he is reading some story or other by Mishima.

“Come to bed, Saul,” Patsy orders him. “Come to bed, my love.”

She takes his hand with one of her hands and clicks off the desk lamp with the other. She draws him back to the bedroom. “No, wait a minute,” she says. “Brush your teeth first. I want to make love to you after you’ve brushed your teeth. I like your mouth when it tastes of toothpaste.”

Saul shuffles into the bathroom, and Patsy follows him, standing behind him with her head on his back as he raises the toothpaste tube, unscrews the cap, and covers the toothbrush with the candied goo, the morning-taste of it. She rubs the flat of her hands over his chest, one of her predictably effective arousal techniques, time-tested. Then she lowers her hand into his pajamas and takes hold of him, a familiar gesture, almost by rote, this preparatory ritual, their cure for the rest of the world. As he brushes his teeth, she feels him slowly becoming hard. The taming of passion into married ceremony has a sweet-and-sour taste for her, passion made manageable and harmless and almost comic, the forest fire reduced to the size of a Franklin stove. Whatever the great passions might be, they are not exemplified by married couples, who have nothing but their day-long familiarities and private languages and their ordinary love to bind them together. The wind outside continues to rattle the windowframes, and now the telephone is ringing again, senselessly. With Patsy’s hand still holding on to him, Saul rinses his mouth out, puts the toothbrush away, and carefully screws the cap back onto the toothpaste tube. Then he turns around and kisses her, a kiss full of desperate friendliness and unsurprise, same old tongue, same old teeth. Saul is willfully half-smiling as he kisses Patsy. It is as if she has caught him in an affair, and now something about themselves as a couple has to be proved, or proved again.

She can almost always make him forget himself and remember her. She has been naked for him so often by now that nakedness has nearly lost its original meaning between the two of them. Sure enough, his mouth tastes of toothpaste. Sure enough, his mouth fits on hers in the usual way. The taste, on top of the Saul-taste, is amusingly discordant, like a bear that has been taught to ride a bicycle and use mouthwash, but the domesticity of it energizes her because he has tamed himself for her. He has renounced being someone else for being her husband, and that renunciation makes up for his anger and his sentimentality. So in addition to her usual nakedness, she will be more naked to him than usual, a disavowal to the indifference they both felt for each other this morning and which (she has kept this secret from him) has shadowed her all day like a bad, unforgettable, and prophetic dream of the death of love between them. This dreadful, sickly, mean-spirited day, one of the worst of her life — it has to be forgotten, it has to be purged.

She struggles tonight to demonstrate more desire than she actually feels just to cleanse the air, but in that struggle she achieves some measure of the craving she has not had access to for weeks. Pretending to have a missing emotion, sometimes you actually get it. A good actor can evoke the nonexistent. She wills herself to open herself to Saul in ways that feel new to her, and through the fog of his preoccupations, at last he notices: good God, what is she doing? Is she really doing that? Saul, for his part, can’t quite believe how slithery and inviting and emotionally naked she is making herself. She is working a purgation, first on herself, and then on him, snaking her way over him and under him, doing a feverish humming thing for him until, as the windows continue to rattle from the stage-managed wind, at last they both come together within a few seconds of each other, and a minute or so later, still looking at the ceiling, Saul thinks: Maybe we should get a dog, you know, we could use a dog, and Patsy thinks: That was it, that time, I’m going to be pregnant again, a boy, I just know it.

Twelve

Gordy hadn’t been suicidal. Still, he had committed suicide. The logic of this confounded everybody.

The superintendent of schools, Floyd Vermilya, called a meeting of faculty and concerned parents and family members one week after Gordy’s death. The meeting was held in the high school auditorium on a Tuesday night. The season being summer, the hallways smelled of floor cleanser, and no one seemed to know how to get all the proper lights directed to the podium on the stage — Harry Bell, the custodial engineer, was on a fishing trip up north — with the result that Superintendent Vermilya, a pumpkin-faced overweight man with a buzzcut and slit-lens reading glasses perched at the tip of his nose, stood speaking to everyone in semidarkness, as did the psychiatric social worker who had been hired to consult and to give advice about the grieving process. The lights were shining on the rear of the auditorium stage, but the superintendent and the social worker by necessity stood in the front, and the effect was that of a poorly rehearsed show. They were probably kind people who meant well. The problem was, Saul thought, there was no grieving because the grief had no source or origin, as grief must. They were disposing of a boy whom nobody liked, who had already disposed of himself. Good intentions didn’t mean much in a struggle with emptiness.

Patsy, carrying Mary Esther, estimated the crowd at about seventy, but no one except Saul seemed particularly sorrow-stricken, and Saul’s mournfulness was freakish; it was not clearly understood by anyone, including Saul. Everyone else had shown up out of curiosity or dutiful-ness. Gordy Himmelman hadn’t made much of an impression on any of his other teachers, Saul discovered, and when he had, the impressions were unfavorable. He had drifted, unloved and unsought, down the birth canal out of the womb, and then, in school, he had drifted from kindergarten onward and upward to the more challenging grades, where he had made his mark by a more accelerated drift toward failure, the boy being mostly friendless and frictionless, slipping and sliding toward his own death, and hostile to those who wanted to help him. Then he destroyed himself, and here, now, were the undestroyed, convening to talk.

After stepping up to the ill-lighted podium, the superintendent said that he had spoken to both of the Bernsteins, Saul and his wonderful wife, Patsy, who had witnessed this terrible event, and he had spoken to Gordy Himmelman’s guardian and next of kin, his aunt, Brenda Bagley, who had owned the gun in question. The sheriff’s office had investigated, and the medical examiner was doing an autopsy to check for a possible drug or alcohol component and to rule out any other possible contributing medical causes. Gordy’s behavior had been observed to be erratic. The boy had been a behavioral problem, certainly, with a learning disability, but he was not particularly exceptional in this regard. So far no one, it appeared, was to blame. Besides, he was a dropout from school. “It was extremely fortunate,” the superintendent said, underlining certain phrases by lowering his voice an octave, “that no one else was hurt.” Then he stifled a yawn.

The collective judgment was that Gordy Himmelman had taken a tragic interest in guns. He had never been properly trained in their use. He played with guns to give himself a feeling of power — to compensate for his poor work at school and for his social failures. The suicide had certain aspects of an accident. Like other troubled youths, especially impulsive young men, Gordy Himmelman had, tragically — his voice once again dropped an octave—taken the easy way out. A life had been snuffed, like a candle’s flame, but after the inquiries so far it appeared to have been nobody’s fault, the superintendent had repeated. “Mistakes were made,” he said, “but we cannot say who made them. Let’s say that we all made them. And let’s go on from there. We can’t dwell forever in the past. The past,” he said, “is a canceled check. We expect never to have another incident like this in Five Oaks. Therefore, we have invited Jane Henderson to help us out.”

The psychiatric social worker, Jane Henderson, who had been brought in from Holbein College, carried her coffee cup to the podium. She was a brisk and efficient woman in her late thirties. Saul thought she had the hardened professionalism of a business consultant: the glaring half-smile, the chignon, the pitiless rules of thumb, the overenunciated words combined with common sense set out in formulated phrases. She assured the audience that teen suicides were terrible tragedies and, furthermore, that they were now epidemic. Terrible as Gordy’s death was, however, it was important to recognize that it had been one of many such suicides all across the United States, each one of them tragically preventable. Saul noticed that the word “tragic” was cropping up repeatedly, compulsively, though no one really meant it or felt it. “I am sorry to report to you,” she said, “that your community is only the latest to have suffered from this terrible plague. What can we do? We can do something. We can empower ourselves. We can watch for signs of trouble.” She then listed, using a PowerPoint demonstration, the ten warning signs of a tragically troubled teen — including clothing signs, verbal signs, gestural signs, the closed doors, the sullenness, the touchiness in response to questions. Gordy had exhibited four and one-half of these signs. He could have been spotted and helped out; at the very least, he could have been given counseling and, perhaps, medication.

“You have to be alert,” Jane Henderson said. “These events can precipitate into a contagion in a community like ours.”

Saul sat with his head in his hands. You couldn’t answer human disorder like Gordy’s with PowerPoint demonstrations. He now wished he had never brought those baby pictures into his remedial-reading class.

Harold reported to Saul that Gordy’s death was the biggest and sometimes the only topic of conversation in the barbershop, and the talk often implicated Saul and Patsy, but ambiguously and circularly, and only because they had been standing nearby in the house when Gordy’s gun went off in the front yard. What had he been doing on their lawn, in front of that tree? What had he been doing there, off and on, all that year? No one could explain. It was mystifying, and Saul knew that his and Patsy’s proximity to Gordy’s death would mark them as accessories to the mystification.

The boy hadn’t previously threatened to kill himself or anyone else. He had displayed the gun the way other boys displayed their baseball cards. There had been no desperate spoken ultimatums. He hadn’t seemed particularly unhappy; he wasn’t atypical, unless you counted his attention deficits. As the days went on, Saul thought that Gordy had fired a bullet into his brain on a whim. MAD IN AMERICA. . that was Gordy all over, committing suicide as a weirdly unpromising practical joke. Or: he had performed an auto-jihad. Even Bob Pawlak had no explanation. “Total surprise to me,” he said, shrugging. The autopsy turned up no drugs or alcohol in Gordy’s bloodstream. The other possibility, of a genuine despair, was somehow unthinkable in Gordy’s case. Certainly the gun itself wasn’t to blame. Was it? In any case, after the medical examiner’s autopsy, there was no funeral and no memorial service and no reminiscences about the boy. Gordy’s family couldn’t afford a funeral, his aunt had said (really, since no one except the aunt wanted to acknowledge him as kin, there was no family), and no one had much of anything to remark about Gordy’s life, such as it had been. What could you say about him? Like God, he was who he was. He was close to invisible, and then he had erased the only visibility he had. She said she would just scatter his ashes out in back of the trailer where he had lived. When Saul began to inquire over the telephone about this economizing, Gordy’s aunt asked him: What about Gordy, did he think, was worth remembering? He was better off held back in the past without anybody creating too much of a fuss over him now, she said. It occurred to Saul that Gordy’s aunt thought that suicides were shameful and that she had to get rid of him in a hurry. When she used those school words, “held back,” Saul felt himself shiver, as if someone’s fingers soaked in ice water were traveling down his spine. “No use crying over that boy anymore, no earthly use that I can see,” she said, in a call she made to Saul on a Saturday afternoon. “I’ve cried enough. Leave him be, resting in peace. Don’t you want him to rest in peace?”

The child Cossack, he thought, my adversary, he deserved better than this.

“Yes,” he said. “Only it makes me angry that he killed himself.”

“Angry?”

“Sure. I get mad when I think about it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t get mad about it,” she said. “I wouldn’t get riled up.” Saul didn’t have the impression that she really wanted to talk to him anymore; her voice had a smoky flaring-up and fading-back. She went on talking in her dazed way. “You aren’t responsible or anything. I’m not going to sue you or anybody else, is what I’m saying,” she said. “Despite what some people have been suggesting to me. Don’t you worry about that. I’m not going after your money now. Besides, I already thanked you for your generosity.”

Saul knew better than to respond, especially about money. After taking another breath, Brenda Bagley said that she was sorry that she hadn’t hidden the gun any better than she had. Gordy had found it squirreled away in a shoe box in her closet, where she had thought he’d never find it.

On the afternoon following this conversation, he and Brenda Bagley drove to the Five Oaks Funeral Home and picked up Gordy’s ashes in a plastic box. The funeral director, Lewis Binch, was an affable man in a pinstriped suit, perfectly tailored; his eyes were alert and searching in an Irish manner — the entire face displayed a resigned, comic intelligence as he sat behind his desk in his office, offering good-humored consolation. He seemed well acquainted with grief and was not frightened of it. Saul wondered how he hadn’t met this funeral director before; he wanted him as a friend and took his business card, hoping for another occasion to meet prior to a death, especially his own.

The box of ashes was as big as a dictionary, and its contents rattled; Saul estimated its weight at about twelve pounds. After driving Brenda Bagley back home, he carried the box into her trailer, following her. As soon as she was inside, she turned on the enormous television set and stood for a moment to see what programs were on. “You can put it over there,” she said, pointing to a sofa on which a white cat slept, while she watched the TV screen, as an old sea captain would watch a lighthouse. Saul laid the box of ashes on the sofa opposite the cat. He left without saying goodbye, while she went on watching the TV screen, avoiding shipwreck, though she waved absentmindedly as he walked out the door.

After the summer storms and the articles about Gordy’s death in the Five Oaks News-Chronicle, accompanied by a lengthy and hard-hitting editorial about troubled children and guns, and the terrible inexplicable epidemic of student violence in American schools, Patsy went to her OB-GYN and confirmed what she already knew, that she was newly pregnant. She did not say that Gordy’s death had inspired the two of them to create this child; some things you didn’t have to tell Saul.

When she informed Saul that night at dinner about her pregnancy, he stood up at the table and walked over to where she sat to kiss her and hug her. His joy was manufactured for her benefit — she could instantly tell— but manufactured joy was better than none at all, and she admired his efforts to be glad on her behalf. He himself would be glad spontaneously, in time. His feelings needed some duration to establish themselves on whatever solid ground Saul might find.

The stain of Gordy’s blood on the linden wouldn’t wash off: Saul had tried soapsuds and Clorox, sponging the bark of the tree, until it came to him that he was being just like Gordy’s aunt, trying to wash all traces of him away, and he stopped.

For a week after that he watched television. It was like taking a bath in forgetfulness. Whatever they had on television wasn’t good or bad: it was just television. If you put a Vermeer on television, it stopped being a Vermeer and turned into something else on television.

Sometimes he watched with Mary Esther perched in his lap. He combed her hair idly, shook her music-box teddy bear, bounced her, fed her, read Pat the Bunny, and sang “Little Red Caboose” to her when the mood struck him. He began to hope for certain commercials to reappear, the ones with happy tunes. Whenever she fussed, he carried her around the house and then outside. He did not sleep consistently at night. He wasn’t unhappy, nor was he depressed; he just wasn’t anything — this was how he explained it to himself. He was preoccupied by a certain variety of nothingness, full of colors and moods. It was a kingdom, and he had just made his respectful way through the front gate. Patsy stayed up with him as long as she could, holding his hand, and then she went to bed.

It made no sense to try to love one’s enemy when the enemy was already dead. It was a stupid spiritual practice, and Christian, besides.

After enduring another week of this, Patsy came downstairs one morning and told Saul that he should take a trip somewhere, anywhere, just for a few days, to let the miles soak up in him. He needed to travel, to watch the telephone poles fly by in their sedative manner. It wasn’t that she wanted him out of the house; she just thought that he needed to get away. He didn’t hunt or fish — he didn’t have any of those male outdoorsy escape valves — but he could at least go to one or two cities and visit the museums. That would be a nice Saul thing to do, she said, before school started again and he found himself extemporizing in one classroom or another. She could manage Mary Esther on her own for a few days.

Following her advice, he called ahead to a few friends and then packed several days’ worth of clean clothes. He didn’t like to fly because airport terminals and their long receding concourses reminded him of gigantic vacuum-cleaner hoses sucking him and everyone else into nullity. He preferred taking the train.

At the doors of the Detroit Amtrak station he leaned into the car and kissed Patsy and Mary Esther goodbye. He took the train to Washington on a coach ticket he had bought on the Web. He arrived at Union Station three hours late. For two nights he stayed with a couple he knew, Buzz Henselt and his girlfriend, Sarah. The two of them lived in a walkup near Cleveland Heights in the District and were doing moderately well— Sarah worked for a writers-in-the-schools project, and Buzz, who was good at budget analysis, had landed a job in the Department of Transportation — but Saul realized that he was in a fog and wasn’t keeping up his end of the conversation, particularly when Buzz and Sarah asked him about himself and Patsy and Mary Esther. All he could say was, “Oh, we’re fine,” before lapsing into silence and staring at their Edward Hopper poster (the house, not the nighthawks) framed on the living-room wall, or the Ralston Crawford poster in the dining room. He realized that his presence there was a puzzle to them. He was an inexplicable and unsatisfying guest. He wasn’t terribly interested in them anymore and answered their questions as if he were talking about someone else or taking a quiz, and, no, as it turned out, he didn’t want to go to the National Gallery.

He slept on a cot in their study, close enough to the computer so that he could hear its internal fan whirring all night in sleep mode, almost covering the sounds of Buzz and Sarah’s snoring and snorts and conversations in the next room. Still childless, they hadn’t yet learned how to muffle themselves. In the corner, Buzz and Sarah’s African gray parrot, Jack, muttered and scrabbled about in his cage. The bird had acquired a fiendish expertise for imitating ringing telephones and dripping faucets, and in moments of bravado would imitate Sarah’s asthma wheeze, allergy-related coughing, and gasps during intercourse. “Shut up,” Saul would say, and within hours the bird started to answer, “Shut up.”

At breakfast, Buzz asked Saul whether there wasn’t something he— Saul — wanted to talk about, and Saul shook his head. “I’m sort of in this box, and I can’t exactly open it up, but I’m okay,” he said. “That’s all. It’s not serious. Don’t worry about me.” He went back to his bagel and the sports page. He didn’t mention Gordy Himmelman, feeling that it would be an imposition. Too long living in the Midwest had made him a practitioner of self-effacing obtuse cheerfulness, he realized.

Finally, after calling to make sure she’d be there, he borrowed Buzz and Sarah’s car and drove over to Bethesda to his mother’s house. He had grown up in this house and was happy to think of it as no longer his, or as home, or as a place where he would willingly stay for more than a few hours at a time. Standing on the sidewalk, Saul inspected the lawn and the front garden: they were carefully tended, the edges of the grass properly clipped, the lilac at the side of the house perfectly trimmed, the geranium in its pot on the front stoop well-watered. Pansies filled the flower bed. Somebody was indeed taking care of his mother, or of her lawn, lush and green as it was — prodigal and green and carnal, in its second adolescence, pubic, procreative. After he rang the doorbell, the door opened, and his mother presented herself. “Ah, the weary traveler. You like it?” his mother asked, glancing around at nothing in particular. That was Delia: she had always asked him questions that were too vague to answer.

Saul smiled at her and shrugged. “Very much.” Carrying his overnight bag, he ambled up to her and hugged her.

On close inspection, he could see that something had indeed happened to her. Delia was not herself anymore. She had been divested of her affectations and stripped of her usual ornaments. He had prepared himself for more of her mustard-gas perfume, more girlishness, a bonanza of bracelets and amber necklaces, but she wasn’t wearing any bracelets or necklaces, she had stopped dyeing her hair, and she had done away with the bloody-looking fingernail polish. She just stood there, wearing a new simplicity. She was almost elegant. “Sweetie,” she said, patting him on the cheek. “It’s good to see you. I’m so sorry about that boy. Put your suitcase inside in the foyer and let’s go to the supermarket. We need some groceries for dinner.”

Behind the wheel of his mother’s Camry, negotiating traffic, his newly remodeled mother beside him, Saul suddenly remembered why he disliked the suburbs and had developed an affection for dusty, luckless midwestern cities tucked away inside the folds of the map. The drivers here in suburban Maryland were cunning and ruthless. They engaged in savage tailgating. They were overachieving supervisors in their professional lives and now they were doing their best to overachieve behind the wheel. They wore their successes on their huge muscular sheet-metal fenders. Darwinian, emotionally Republican even if they were registered Democrats, they had acquired German sedans or American SUVs that looked like staff cars for Rommel, or they had huge spotless V-8 pickup trucks with nothing, ever, in the cargo bed — that would spoil the effect, like a suntan that ended at the shirt collar — and most of them drove with one hand, the other hand on their cell phones relaying news to the home-front on how the battle was going. Domestic life in the suburbs, simple trips to the mall, had shifted to a war footing, the drivers so high and mighty behind the wheel that they looked down on any sedan inhabited by civilians.

At the green light, when Saul failed to accelerate immediately, the woman behind him, driving a burgundy F-250, honked at him, and Saul flashed her the finger and began yelling helplessly and with great enraged enthusiasm. She zoomed past him in the left lane, lowered the passenger-side electric window, shouted “Dickhead!” at him, and raced forward. On her truck’s bumper there was a diversity-rainbow sticker. She was very beautiful. He couldn’t chase her: he was driving his mother, his ancient enemy, to the supermarket. Besides, they were underdefended in the Camry, the sort of car driven by worker bees.

“I wish you’d calm down, Saul,” his mother said a few minutes later, after he had flipped the bird to another driver who had first tailgated him and then cut him off. They entered the parking lot for the supermarket, and Saul began the desperate search for a spot. “You’re awfully tense this morning.” She patted him on the knee. “Why don’t you park over there?” She pointed to a space. Saul ignored her. He parked one row farther off, in an opening that he had found for himself. “I see you’ve acquired a bit of road rage,” Delia said, after he stopped and put on the emergency brake with a furious gesture. “I don’t remember that in you before. Don’t go blaming me for that.”

“Oh, I would never blame you for anything,” Saul lied, dropping the keys into the pocket of his leather jacket. “It’s the drivers here. And when did I ever have any equanimity? Well, come on.”

He walked slightly behind her to the doors of the market and noticed how his mother’s physical movements had taken on a pensiveness that she’d never displayed before. It wasn’t an effect of aging; it was the consequence of seriousness, of something profound that had happened to her and had taken root. She most likely couldn’t discuss it with him. Having secrets apparently gave people dignity. Watching her, he felt amazement: his mother had acquired an inner life. She had warmed up. And all from a boy lover. He took her arm as gently as he could, and she smiled at him. “Hi, Saul,” she said, stepping up to the curb, as if he had just arrived. “How are you?”

He told her in his blandest voice that he was fine, and as he grabbed a shopping cart inside the automatic doors, she said, “You know, I’m fine, too,” but her face occasionally displayed brief expressions of resignation followed by inappropriate private smiles. Her head nodded, quick flicks. Saul could see that she was carrying on a lengthy inner conversation. She was lying to him; she wasn’t fine at all, of course, but sprightliness had once been in her nature, so she would try to maintain it.

“What?” he asked.

“What ‘what’?” she answered. “Grab some of that romaine lettuce, would you?” He did as he was asked. Music drifted down like plastic icicles from speakers in the ceiling: “Mona Lisa” in a string arrangement. “Do you like green peppers in your salad? Tomatoes? I don’t remember.” Still smiling, she added, “It’s been such a long time. After all, I’m not your mother anymore.” Planted near the produce, she gazed at him, examining him for one second too long. “Sometimes when you stand like that you look like your father.” She made an all-purpose gesture. “Too bad you didn’t inherit his sense of humor.”

“We’re having another child,” he said, trying to forestall any discussion of what he had or had not inherited. “Patsy and I,” he clarified.

“Oh, yes, Patsy told me.” Saul dropped the peppers into the cart, as his mother beamed. “That’s so wonderful. They never arrive when you expect them to, you know — children. By the way, have you talked to your brother lately?” She straightened herself, cleared her throat with a noise like a sheep, and pushed the cart ahead of him, toward the meat counter. She picked up one of the T-bone steaks inside its shrink-wrap and examined it closely, as if, Saul thought, for an infection. “He makes all this money and then he goes out on those extreme sports, or whatever they’re called. Rock climbing and such. So aggressive . At least he’s not moody. When you get into these moods, Saul, I wish you’d go into therapy, or at least get a hobby the way your brother does.”

“In Five Oaks? That’s a good one. You’ve gotten kind of moody yourself, Ma.”

“Me? You still eat meat, don’t you? You haven’t turned into one of these vegetarians?” She dropped two of the steaks into the cart and gazed down the grocery aisle toward the dairy products. She didn’t seem to want to look at him. “I’m not sitting up watching television and sitting around all day, Saul. I’m not making trips all over the country.”

“My seeing you doesn’t have a purpose? Seeing my mother? That’s a hell of a thing to say. It’s summertime. Besides, I’m not in your way. You don’t have a job or anything.”

She banged the shopping cart into his hip, as a nudge. “Well, I know you do have a purpose, being here. And I certainly do have a job. I work. You just don’t know what it is that I do. Do you? No, you don’t. I go to an office four times a week, Saul, where I. .” She nodded to herself. “Oh, never mind. It’s nice, that I have a job, a serious job, and you don’t know what it is. You don’t keep yourself informed. Don’t have a ghost of a clue, do you, honey? You don’t ask.” She turned around to look at him. “What do you mean, I’ve gotten moody?”

“I’m your son,” Saul said. “I can tell.” Shoppers passed them quickly. The two of them, mother and adult son, were becalmed in a sea of shoppers passing by them in waves. “So what’s this job? What’s going on with you, Ma?”

Delia had been looking straight ahead of her, and all at once she flinched. “What’s going on with me? I’m hanging by a thread. Oh, look. Somebody fell.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Up there.” She pointed toward the dairy products and the case for frozen foods. “Somebody fell up there.”

Saul looked in the direction where she was pointing and saw a man on the floor. He was reasonably well dressed, and Saul was quickly ashamed of himself for thinking that people who fell to the floor in public places were always shabby. Anyone could fall to the floor. Saul himself could do so; he was quite capable of it. The man had apparently slipped on some wet linoleum tiles — there was a standing yellow hazard marker just off to the left with a little silhouette figure of a falling person on it — and by the time Saul got there, being careful of his own footing, the man was already on his knees, and then, with Saul’s help, on his feet. “My mistake,” the man said, in apology. Next to where he had fallen there stood, in the center aisle, a pyramid display of canned tomatoes with their brightly dark red labels, and after the man thanked Saul, he brushed himself off and went on his way, carrying a frozen dinner he had picked up from the floor. Saul stayed where he was. He could not take his eyes off the display. The red of the labels was magnetic, visually fixating. Tomato cans! He was unable to look at anything else. People and things passed by him. More bland music of some sort drizzled down from the ceiling speakers — small, drabby, synthetic music — as Saul felt himself sucked wholly into the blood-red colors on the cans.

When he finally came to his senses, his mother was beside him. “A mitzvah,” she said. “Good for you. What’s with those cans, Saul?”

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “They look like. . never mind. Let’s go.”

Ten minutes later, at the checkout line, his mother turned toward him and smiled again. “Oh, I know it’s hard doing this with me. It’s no fun, is it, all grown up and still going to the grocery store with your mother. I just thought it would give us something to do.”

Saul unloaded the grocery cart, lost in thought, watching his mother take out her checkbook. She did it with a restrained bossiness. Down through the years, she had carried on her life without altering it very much for Saul’s, or Howie’s, benefit. Her feminism was personal and private and therefore eccentric, and she had formed the habit of resenting men as a class because her husband had died and left her alone with two sons. Solitude had made her flirty at first, and then impersonal. Getting anything personal out of her was like trying to open a tuna fish can with your thumbs. Saul and Howie had their worlds, she had hers. And the boys shared a guilt with their father, because, one by one, they would grow up and abandon her, which was what males did. Either they died or they took off. In Delia’s version of things, male adulthood was disloyalty by its very nature. Even providing her with another grandchild wouldn’t close that wound.

No wonder a sweet and devoted teenaged lover had knocked the stuffing out of her.

Watching her pay for her groceries, Saul thought of his mother’s dutifulness. She had been good about taking Saul, and then Howie, to Little League practice after Saul’s father had died, but her heart wasn’t in it, in any of those male activities, those sports. Howie’s sickliness had given her a cause to preoccupy her, but her sons didn’t have anything to give her in return. But now, some shift had taken place in her. Her heart had been stripped bare. Sympathies had opened up. Suddenly she was out of character. In midlife she had become someone else. And she deserved everything she got, all the rewards of feeling, Saul thought, especially if she had lost her heart to this kid.

Carrying the groceries out to the car, feeling brave, Saul said, “How’s your love life, Ma? Any prospects?”

“Why? Did Patsy say something to you?”

“No, in fact, she didn’t.”

Saul was putting the grocery bags in the trunk, but he could tell that his mother was checking his face for deceit. She had an internal psycho-galvanometer with Saul and could detect his polite lies a continent away. Her right eyebrow went up, like that of a food critic, and she ran her fingers through her hair. “Yes, there is somebody,” she said. “But I can’t talk about it.”

She waited at the passenger-side door for Saul to unlock and open it for her, which he did, practicing his manners. Back behind the wheel, he asked her why not.

“Because some things you can’t talk about,” Delia said. She was getting grumpy. She harumphed and squirmed in the seat. “All your generation does is talk about sex all the time. Some things should be left to themselves.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” Saul said.

“Listen to you! You quit your job, you come here, you drive me to the Giant and stare at a display of tomato cans, and you tell me that you can talk about anything. Saul, you and I can’t talk about the important things in life, because they’re all secrets. Everything important is a secret. No one ever talks about anything. Deny it. I dare you. That student of yours died, and his death was his secret, and you don’t have the words for it. Who would?”

“It’s not that I wouldn’t, but that I can’t. It’s beyond me. In your case, you can, but you won’t.”

“Well, as for ‘can’t,’ I can’t believe I’m having this conversation,” Delia said. Saul turned the key to the ignition, and the car, in its puny way, roared to life. “All right. I’ll tell you something. He’s very. . young. He’s a very young man.”

“What’s his name?” Saul asked, driving out of the parking lot and pretending nonchalance.

“Jimmy,” Delia told him, and when she said the word, Saul accidentally hit the brake, throwing both himself and his mother against their seatbelts. A car behind them screeched to a stop and the driver honked at them.

“Sorry,” Saul said. “I’m not used to this car.” He was blushing.

Delia stared straight ahead at the traffic. Saul could see that his mother’s eyes were watering. “Patsy told you, didn’t she? Patsy told you about Jimmy.”

Saul nodded. “And it’s not that he’s married, right?”

“Well,” she said, “no. Just that he’s very young. Anyway, anyway. You keep driving. Drive home and I’ll make you dinner, and then you can go back to your friends. Maybe I’ll say something about him and maybe I won’t. But first let me say this, honey. I’m really glad you came. And of course I do know why,” she said, looking radiantly pleased all of a sudden. She tapped his right knee, like a chum.

“Why?”

“Don’t be coy, Saul.”

“I’m not being coy.”

“Of course you are. It’s so nice, your doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Coming to see me. Today.”

“What about today?” Saul asked.

“Are you waiting for the right moment?” his mother asked. “Any moment is the right moment.”

“To do what?”

“To wish me a happy birthday!” She smiled at him and put her hand on his leg.

Great Leaping Jesus. Jesus on His Throne in Ohio. He gasped for a breath. Saul calculated the date and realized that — yes — it was indeed his mother’s birthday today. Maybe he really did need a therapist, one to accompany him everywhere he went from here to the grave, and possibly beyond. Another prank played by the unconscious, one of the many. Imagine the planning, the care, the indecency, the deceit . Where was dignity? Nowhere on this Earth. Perhaps in Israel. Maybe he would move there; his mother would never follow him — she had a thing about Palestinians — and his unconscious would band together with the other unconsciouses running amuck in Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories. Looking in the rearview mirror, as if he were being swallowed by what was behind him, Saul was horrified, as ever, by the terrible ironies of which life was so fond. But he was driving, and in Maryland traffic, so he could not express his horror safely and honorably. He would have to bottle it up and put it with all the other demented preserves in the basement and then wait for it to explode. He kept his hands on the wheel. The FBI would be here any minute now.

“Well, yes, exactly,” he said with pretended calm. “Happy birthday, Mom!”

“Thank you. Don’t pretend you forgot.” She smiled and touched her hand to her hair. “Don’t you dare pretend that your visit here was accidental. I’m so touched that you made the trip to see me on my birthday. Especially at this time in your life.”

“Actually,” Saul said, “I want to stop at a flower shop. Or somewhere. Right now.”

“Oh, you don’t have to get me anything, cupcake. It’s enough that you were so thoughtful to come see me.”

“Please don’t call me that cupcake thing, Ma. No, I want to.”

He turned the car into another strip mall with a flower shop. He quickly bought some cut roses and came running out to the car with them.

“Happy birthday,” he said, shoving the flowers in her direction through the passenger-side window. She smiled, sat up, and put them into her lap.

“You’re so thoughtful,” his mother said, with sweet, dignified, middle-aged irony. “I’ll be lucky if Howie even remembers to phone.”

When they returned to the house, Saul spied a pickup truck two houses away, and, out in front, a scrawny young man mowing the lawn, an ordinary guy, Saul thought, wearing a T-shirt and a cap with the visor turned backward. When he glanced at his mother, she gave him an almost imperceptible nod. Saul thought that if this guy had appeared in one of his classes, he wouldn’t have given him a second look.

After a quiet dinner with his mother, and his return to his friends the next morning, Saul took the train up to New York. The cheapest hotel he could find was close to Gramercy Park, and for his first day he walked around Manhattan. The wonderful ruined glorious old city. He particularly enjoyed getting lost in Chinatown and Little Italy, the tangle of ethnicity and streets in the lower part of Manhattan, where every place you turned from midmorning to the middle of the night you smelled food cooking, scalding cooking oil mixed with the overripe background odor of garbage, and he enjoyed the heat that rose from the pavement, the way it went through your body like an X-ray, the flesh porously absorbing it, how there was no stopping it and no cooling off. Everyone became hot, everyone became the heat. Particularly around West Broadway, the city streets felt abandoned by serious persons in the summer, nothing but human castoffs and scruffy kids filling up the sidewalk space and yelling all day and night. He felt right at home. In the East Village he sat on a park bench soiled with dried pigeon dung and ate an ice cream cone. He watched everyone pass by, and he was perfectly happy.

On the second afternoon, a Thursday, following a trip uptown, he had disembarked from the Lexington Avenue local at Grand Central and was headed down the underground tunnel in the direction of the shuttle to Times Square. He had an out-of-towner’s pride in his mastery of the New York City subway system and never consulted a map. And he loved the subway itself: the noise, the electric-iron smell, the occasional glimpses of rats, the whackos riding the trains, the sweat of flushed bodies in proximity to one another, the ads in Spanish advocating safe sex. For him the subway was an urban ideal. On the subway, Saul felt very tall, and very blond, and very handsome, at least in comparison to everyone else. The most intricate stations — Times Square, Grand Central— were monuments of human ingenuity and engineering. Saul was more impressed by the ceiling of Grand Central Terminal than he had been by man’s journey to the moon, and he suspected that the entire New York subway system was now beyond what human beings were capable of. Not the technology, but the willpower, the ideal of the public good.

Halfway through the tunnel he heard music. On the other side, close to where the shuttle trains were, stood a band, a typical subway assemblage of musicians, in this case of Peruvian Indians playing music from the Andes. The music reverberated through the narrow subterranean passage; he had heard the music before he had seen the five men performing on their charangos and mandolins and guitars and sikus. It sounded like high-altitude mountain music, harmonies and rhythms and chord changes conceived in the upper atmospheres and brought down to the metal and concrete below ground level. He approached the band. They had CDs for sale; the label said that their name was Ch’uwa Yacu. He even loved the sound of that, without having any idea of how to pronounce it. Saul felt himself drawn up into the music, absorbed by it, as he had been by the heat off the sidewalks. He tossed a five-dollar bill into the musicians’ open guitar case.

When he looked up, on the other side of the small crowd, wedged in near the back, he saw Gordy Himmelman behind what seemed to be a slight curtain of gauze, his eyes wide open and staring. Gordy, a hayseed ghost out of his element, was looking first at the musicians and then back at Saul, full in the face, and his mouth was gaping dark with distracted amazement. But of course it wasn’t Gordy. It was just anybody’s boy.

He was offering himself to me for adoption, Saul thought. He was a stray dog. That’s why he stood out there on the lawn. But I didn’t want to. I couldn’t take him.

Saul waited for a moment, and then it came: what he had been anticipating, the breaking-open, and, very quietly, so as not to disturb the other listeners, he unobtrusively boarded the shuttle to Times Square, his shoulders shaking. He didn’t know how long he sat there, once he got on, though he did remember to put on his dark glasses. Tears streamed quietly from under the lenses down his cheeks and onto his shirt. The shuttle took him to its destination, and then took him back to Grand Central, and then returned to Times Square. Everyone ignored him. They came and left, came and left. He simply lost track of the time as he was ferried from one place to the other.