Henry himself, p.32
Henry, Himself, page 32
“Funny,” he said.
He must have had a nosebleed in his sleep and then at some point gone to the bathroom. Had other people seen the blood and wondered? He thought there would be traces on his pajamas, but they were clean. No spots on the carpet, no used tissues in the wastebasket. The stain was undeniable, even if he didn’t remember a thing. Now his suspicion of Lisa seemed doubly shameful, as if he’d slandered her, and he felt foolish, the great detective tracking down clues, when all along it had been him.
Bon Appétit
He was done with the onions and didn’t care for the yams, but there were enough mashed potatoes and stuffing and pea casserole to last a week, plus extra turkey and gravy in the basement, in case Emily was gone longer. She’d bought a twenty-pounder to feed seven people, two of whom were children. More than once, over the phone, she’d needlessly instructed him not to throw away the carcass so she could make soup, which she said she liked better than Thanksgiving dinner, a confession that struck him as blasphemous. It was his favorite. Lunch and dinner he prepared the same plate, making a crater in his potatoes for gravy, covering it with Saran wrap and fishing it from the microwave with oven mitts, giving the cranberry its own separate dish. He ate in the breakfast nook, watching the news, meaning he saw it three times, the stories repeating until he knew what the neighbor down the street from the fire or the drug bust or the home invasion was going to say. He quickly ran out of Lisa’s cinnamon whipped cream, and while he blamed the pumpkin pie for his heartburn, he liked having it. At his side, Rufus waited, angling for a bite of crust.
He didn’t mind eating alone so much, but as the week passed he was surprised to find he missed doing the dishes. Dinner, especially, seemed incomplete. With no mixing bowls or Cuisinart parts or pots and pans to clean, he could go days without running a load. Each time he rinsed his plate and added it to the rack, he saw it as a loss.
Emily worried that with her not there to feed him, he wasn’t eating right. “What did you have for dinner?”
“L.O.’s.”
“Uck. Aren’t you sick of them yet?”
In Bastogne, surrounded, they’d eaten a horse they’d found frozen in a flattened barn. The horse was small, and the rats had been at it. The joke was that it was some kid’s pony. They roasted it over a fire, the meat sizzling, and lined up with their kits like a regular mess call. As they ate, they laughed and licked the grease from their fingers. It was too rich for their empty stomachs and made them sick, half of the company throwing up in the snow. In his bedroll after lights-out, Embree made neighing sounds. That winter, how many times had Henry dreamed of his mother’s Thanksgiving dinner?
“No,” he said. “I like them.”
“I thought you were supposed to be watching your salt.”
“I’m supposed to be watching my everything.”
“Enjoy it now, mister, ’cause come Sunday things are going to be different.”
“Promises, promises.”
“It’s true. She’s coming home tomorrow, ready or not, and I’m getting the heck out of here.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“I’m not so sure it is, but I’m done arguing with her.”
He celebrated with a piece of pie—a mistake, he realized later, swallowing glass after glass of water to keep down the sour reflux. In Bastogne, he’d eaten his fill with no ill effects besides some wild dreams. Now a slice of pie kept him up half the night.
Knowing she was coming home, he didn’t feel the need to change his diet—in fact, the opposite. Her first day back, she’d go shopping and make soup. His job now was to clean out the fridge, and he attacked it with purpose, each meal doing double duty as he chipped away at what remained—finishing the pie, then the cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes and stuffing, and lastly the pea casserole, running a load of Tupperware—trying to fix it so that by the time she arrived, it would be all gone.
’Tis the Season
He thought that when she returned they’d fall back into their routine, but her time at Margaret’s had put her a good week behind. While she was away, she’d made lists. She was grateful he’d decorated, though she noticed right off—before he opened the back door—that they needed wreaths. She hoped the Altar Guild still had some poinsettias left. She hadn’t even started her real shopping. She didn’t have anything for Sam or Lisa, and everything needed to be shipped. “I don’t see how I’m going to get it all done in two weeks.”
Technically she had eighteen days, but he didn’t say that. The holidays always set her off, and after Thanksgiving, he knew the feeling.
“Let me know what I can do,” he said, an offer she deflected with a put-upon look, as if he were joking.
Her first big job was sending out Christmas cards, the shot of the whole family on the lawn at Chautauqua. Fortified by a cup of tea and some Handel, she set up shop at the dining room table, going through last year’s pile, editing her address book as she went. How many times had he offered to type the master list into his computer so all she’d have to do was hit a key to print the envelopes, but she insisted on doing them by hand. Her penmanship was a source of pride, though with her arthritis she had to stop every so often and knead her fingers. It was a project, one she threatened to make his or stop altogether, yet every year she battled her way through the stack.
As if in sympathy, he spent the morning at his desk, organizing his tax receipts, listening to her mutter under her breath. He was muttering himself, adding up a long column of medical expenses, when she asked him a question he didn’t quite catch.
“Hang on,” he called, and came out. Rufus lay under the table, half in the sun. “How’s it going?”
“Didn’t the Beardsleys move? I swear they moved.”
“Did we get a card from them last year?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s their old address. Do we know a Gregory?” She pointed to a red envelope addressed in a curling, girlish script. “They’re not from church. I checked the directory.”
“No idea.”
“How about this Knapp?”
“That’s Fred.” Henry had known him more than forty years, yet Emily never remembered his name.
She centered a new envelope in front of her and took up her pen again. He leaned in to steal a kiss. “Okay. Go away.”
He left her alone, letting her get into a rhythm. When the clock struck one, she stopped for lunch.
Her back hurt, she complained, and her eyes. “I started too late. Usually I’m done with them by now.”
“You’ll be fine. Most of them are local. They’ll only take a day or two to get there.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. I can’t do anything until I’m done with them. It’s already the ninth. I still have to buy everyone presents and wrap them and box them up and ship them ten different places.”
“I can help ship them.”
“No, you can’t, because I haven’t bought them yet. I can’t buy them until I’m done with these stupid cards.”
“Fair enough.”
“That’s not helpful,” she said. “You know what you can do, you can go buy me a hundred stamps. That would be helpful.”
“Any particular kind?”
“I don’t care. You make a decision for once.”
In the car, he argued that he made decisions all the time. He understood that she was overwhelmed, but that was no excuse. He’d offered to help. He wasn’t sure what else he could do.
The line was slow at the post office, his fellow customers balancing precarious armloads of packages, as if to prove her point. There were three positions but only one open. “Anyone just dropping off?” a clerk from the back in a Pirates hat asked, and several people behind Henry piled their boxes on the counter and took off. When it was finally his turn, his choice was between a simple green wreath or a gilded Renaissance Madonna and child Emily would like in a museum but might find too Catholic for their Christmas card. The wreaths were boring. To be safe, he bought a hundred and twenty of them.
She thanked him and apologized, not getting up from the table. “I just need to get these done, then I’ll be fine.”
“I understand,” he said, but of course once she finished them she was in a panic at not being able to find Sarah the perfect gift, and about how they were running out of time to ship everything, and what she was going to make for Christmas dinner now that it was just the two of them. It was normal, and foolish of him to expect anything different. While she was away, he’d forgotten how powerfully she broadcast her feelings, filling the house like a kind of nerve gas. Now, as the days passed, he grew used to it again, its absence—that brief period of calm—harder and harder to recall. She could be cutting and abrupt, unthinking, and yet, for all her faults, working beside her in the kitchen, or after dinner, watching her go over her lists, or in bed, listening to her sleep, he was glad to have her home.
Charity
It was the season of giving, and everyone wanted money. The Heart Association and the Community Food Bank, the Special Olympics and Goodwill—all worthy causes he would have considered if they’d asked him properly. Instead they sent junk mail, lazy computer-generated letters, just hoping he’d take the bait. Emily was bombarded by Carnegie Museum and the Heinz History Center, the symphony and the Frick, a higher class of beggar. Every day more came, filling their mailbox. Habitat for Humanity and the Little Sisters of the Poor. It was almost comic. They must have gotten on someone’s list, because he couldn’t remember it ever being this bad.
The holidays were expensive enough. Besides the eventual credit card bills looming like icebergs, everyone expected a tip. He gave Mary the paper carrier forty dollars, which he suspected was too much. Legally their mailman wasn’t allowed to accept gratuities, but Henry left another forty for him in a festive envelope. Emily gave Betty her bonus closer to Christmas, as if it were a present—a hundred dollars in crisp twenties he made a special trip to the bank for, along with twenties for the garbagemen and his barber.
While Henry was careful with their money, he was happy to support organizations where there was a personal connection involved. Emily was always writing checks to the YWCA and the library and QED and Phipps Conservatory and the Oratorio Society, and rightfully so. As a parent and good neighbor, he’d bought his share of Little League raffle tickets and marching band candy bars and Girl Scout cookies. He understood fund-raising as part of the social contract. Now, though he hadn’t asked for them, he felt cheap keeping the Humane Society’s self-sticking address labels and chucking the rest, but if he gave to every place that sent him some freebie, they’d go broke.
The one charity he contributed to every December was Calvary Camp, a summer retreat on Lake Erie where the children had taken tennis and archery lessons and advanced lifesaving. His mother had served on the board, and he gave in her memory, a legacy. Like their monthly pledge to the church, it was tax-deductible, yet Thursday, when their annual ask letter arrived, among several others, rather than feeling relief at the chance to support a cause close to his heart, he noted with dismay that the upper range of suggested donations had risen to ten thousand dollars.
As a former chair of the church’s capital campaign, he recognized the message. If few families could tick off the last box, it put a subtle pressure on the rest of them to give more. In the past he’d given five hundred, even last year, after the market crashed. There was no doubt that by the end of the month he’d write the camp a check, the only question was how much. For now he stuffed the letter back in the envelope and tucked it behind their other bills so he wouldn’t have to look at it.
During the vestry meeting the next week, Alan Humphries, in his most flamboyant tone, opened their new business with, “Behold, I bring you tidings of great joy.” Sometime in the spring they hoped to receive a mid-six-figure gift from an angel who wished to remain anonymous, but who, Alan coyly made plain without saying, was Evvie Dunbar. Henry, who’d spent years trying to raise funds for a new heating system, was thrilled but also jealous, and comforted himself with the fact that the money was most likely her father’s, a banker allied through marriage with the Mellons. The accountants for the diocese were still in discussions with her people over the best way to accept the gift, so there would be no public announcement, but it was practically a done deal.
Normally Henry couldn’t wait to share news like this with Emily, but kept quiet. She’d find out soon enough, he figured, and what if it fell through? What did mid-six-figures mean? The possibilities staggered him. With half of that he could set up an irrevocable trust to pay taxes on the cottage in perpetuity. Evvie had no family to take care of. She could have just as easily left it to the church as part of her estate, so why now?
He knew he was being petty. It wasn’t Evvie’s fault. He liked to think he’d do the same in her position. If his reaction was any gauge, he thought it was smart of her to remain anonymous.
Throughout the holidays, on its front page, under a Hungerford cartoon of a roly-poly man wearing a fake beard and lugging a bulging sack of presents, the Post-Gazette ran a list of people and businesses who’d donated to buy gifts for the city’s needy children. When he was a boy, socking away nickels and dimes from his paper route, Henry had wanted to be on the list, as if it were a kind of honor. He never understood why people would choose to be anonymous. Though he knew better now, nothing had changed.
The gas and electric bills were due on the fifteenth. When he’d finished with them, all that was left was the envelope with the camp logo, its rustic A-frame chapel facing the rays of a Lake Erie sunset. The inclination to clear the decks and be done with it was stronger than his desire to put the job off again, and with the same grimace he wore when he paid the gas and electric, he bent over his checkbook, thinking of Evvie’s gift and his mother and their dwindling portfolio, and wrote down the same amount he gave them every year.
A few days later, Emily had to write a check for Betty and saw the record in the ledger.
“That was generous of you,” she said, as if he’d been extravagant, and he remembered the girl who kept a log of her expenses to the penny and insisted on going Dutch. She, of all people, understood.
“It was,” he said.
Clutter
Emily didn’t appreciate magnets on her new refrigerator. They looked messy, she said, and were forever falling off. Summarily banished, the Lucite-framed pictures of the grandchildren and the plastic chip clips and the cartoon box trucks with the plumber’s and furnace man’s numbers and the Pirates’ and Steelers’ and Penguins’ schedules from the beer distributor crowded the old avocado GE downstairs, since that was Henry’s domain, leaving her stainless steel prize unblemished. The one concession she made was on the side by the wall phone. Here, in case of emergency, kept in place with a simple black disk, was Dr. Runco’s business card, which Henry noticed one morning while he was pacing, on hold with the cable company. Joseph P. Runco, M.D. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t seen it in all the months that had passed, and felt bad, as if he’d forgotten him, and though the office number hadn’t changed, with his free hand he slid the card from under the magnet and crumpled it up, stepped on the lever that popped the trash can lid and dropped it in.
Do You Hear What I Hear?
The Christmas pageant drew the biggest crowd of the year at Calvary, bigger than Easter or the midnight service Christmas Eve, and for good reason. Directed by Susie Pennington from a script they themselves had written, the combined Sunday school classes acted out the story of the nativity, complete with topical jokes, mumbled dialogue and a menagerie of rented animals that bleated and peed and pooped without warning. Henry and Emily had front-row seats, in this case a mixed blessing. One year, as the three kings knelt in tribute to the baby doll playing Jesus, a camel blocking Emily’s line of sight passed gas with the volume and duration of a foghorn, nearly asphyxiating her, and then there was the lamb that wriggled out of its pint-sized shepherd’s arms and darted around like a greased pig until one of the handlers tackled it in the morning chapel. Like a traveling carnival, the pageant brought with it a playful air of anarchy. Anything could happen, and so as this edition’s Mary and Joseph searched the alleys of Bethlehem for lodging, when a commotion broke out in the rear, Henry expected it to be animal-related, and was surprised to see Ed McWhirter and two paramedics hustling down the aisle, one of them lugging what looked like a tackle box.
Twenty rows back, the congregation had parted. Someone was lying flat on the pew, a silver-haired woman in pearls tending to them until the paramedics took over. The pageant didn’t stop, which Henry thought was wrong.
“Can you see who it is?” Emily asked.
The paramedics wore blue latex gloves as if they expected blood. “No idea.”
He thought it was probably a stroke or a heart attack—a reasonable fear now, the sudden, overwhelming blow. If that was his fate, he hoped it was quick. His father’s final stroke had left him paralyzed on his right side, his mouth twisted, one eyelid drooping as if he were sleepy. In the hospital he was too weak to hold his own water glass, and dipped his head, his lips fishing for the straw.
“I think that was Sally Burgess trying to help,” Emily said. “She’s a nurse.”
“They’re lucky she was there.”
He considered it in bad taste to stare, and faced forward. The pageant dragged on, a less urgent spectacle. Tinsel-haloed and ponytailed, the angel broadcast her glad tidings from the pulpit, the microphone cutting out, making her repeat her big line with naked impatience. “Seek ye him by the light of a star.”
The organ pealed, startling the donkey, and they all rose. A gaggle of kindergarteners dressed like stars zigzagged down the aisle, followed by robed shepherds carrying lambs. On both sides, like paparazzi, parents leaned in to snap pictures, their cameras clicking.
