Читаем The Corrections полностью

“I know you don’t,” Chip said. “Although it’s a little more complicated than you might—”

“What is so complicated about obeying the law?”

“Gary, for God’s sake,” Denise said with a sigh. “It’s Christmas?”

“And you’re a thief,” Gary said, wheeling on her.

“What?”

“You know what I’m talking about. You sneaked into somebody’s room and you took a thing that didn’t belong—”

“Excuse me,” Denise said hotly, “I restored a thing that was stolen from its rightful—”

“Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!”

“Oh, I’m not sitting here for this,” Enid wailed. “Not on Christmas morning!”

“No, Mother, sorry, you’re not going anywhere,” Gary said. “We’re going to sit here and have our little talk right now.”

Alfred gave Chip a complicit smile and gestured at the others. “You see what I have to put up with?”

Chip arranged his face in a facsimile of comprehension and agreement.

“Chip, how long are you here for?” Gary said.

“Three days.”

“And, Denise, you’re leaving on—”

“Sunday, Gary. I’m leaving on Sunday.”

“So what’s going to happen on Monday, Mom? How are you going to make this house work on Monday?”

“I’ll think about that when Monday comes.”

Alfred, still smiling, asked Chip what Gary was talking about.

“I don’t know, Dad.”

“You really think you’re going to go to Philadelphia?” Gary said. “You think Corecktall’s going to fix all this?”

“No, Gary, I don’t,” Enid said.

Gary didn’t seem to hear her answer. “Dad, here, do me a favor,” he said. “Put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

“Gary, stop it,” Denise said.

Alfred leaned close to Chip and spoke confidentially. “What’s he asking?”

“He wants you to put your right hand on your left shoulder.”

“That’s a lot of nonsense.”

“Dad?” Gary said. “Come on, right hand, left shoulder.”

“Stop it,” Denise said.

“Let’s go, Dad. Right hand, left shoulder. Can you do that? You want to show us how you follow simple instructions? Come on! Right hand. Left shoulder.”

Alfred shook his head. “One bedroom and a kitchen is all we need.”

“Al, I don’t want one bedroom and a kitchen,” Enid said.

The old man pushed his chair away from the table and turned once more to Chip. He said, “You can see it’s not without its difficulties.”

As he stood up, his leg buckled and he pitched to the floor, dragging his plate and place mat and coffee cup and saucer along with him. The crash might have been the last bar of a symphony. He lay on his side amid the ruins like a wounded gladiator, a fallen horse.

Chip knelt down and helped him into a sitting position while Denise hurried to the kitchen.

“It’s quarter to eleven,” Gary said as if nothing unusual had happened. “Before I leave, here’s a summary. Dad is demented and incontinent. Mom can’t have him in this house without a lot of help, which she says she doesn’t want even if she could afford it. Corecktall is obviously not an option, and so what I want to know is what you’re going to do. Now, Mother. I want to know now.”

Alfred rested his shaking hands on Chip’s shoulders and gazed in wonder at the room’s furnishings. Despite his agitation, he was smiling.

“My question,” he said. “Is who owns this house? Who takes care of all of this?”

“You own it, Dad.”

Alfred shook his head as if this didn’t square with the facts as he understood them.

Gary was demanding an answer.

“I guess we’ll have to try the drug holiday,” Enid said.

“Fine, try that,” Gary said. “Put him in the hospital, see if they ever let him out. And while you’re at it, you might take a drug holiday yourself.”

“Gary, she got rid of it,” Denise said from the floor, where she’d knelt with a sponge. “She put it in the Disposall. So just lay off.”

“Well, I hope you learned your lesson there, Mother.”

Chip, in the old man’s clothes, wasn’t able to follow this conversation. His father’s hands were heavy on his shoulders. For the second time in an hour, somebody was clinging to him, as if he were a person of substance, as if there were something to him. In fact, there was so little to him that he couldn’t even say whether his sister and his father were mistaken about him. He felt as if his consciousness had been shorn of all identifying marks and transplanted, metempsychotically, into the body of a steady son, a trustworthy brother. . .

Gary had dropped into a crouch beside Alfred. “Dad,” he said, “I’m sorry it had to end this way. I love you and I’ll see you again soon.”

“Well. Yurrr vollb. Yeaugh,” Alfred replied. He lowered his head and looked around with rank paranoia.

“And you, my feckless sibling.” Gary spread his fingers, clawlike, on top of Chip’s head in what he apparently meant as a gesture of affection. “I’m counting on you to help out here.”

“I’ll do my best,” Chip said with less irony than he’d aimed for.

Gary stood up. “I’m sorry I ruined your breakfast, Mom. But I, for one, feel better for having got this off my chest.”

“Why you couldn’t have waited till after the holiday,” Enid muttered.

Gary kissed her cheek. “Call Hedgpeth tomorrow morning. Then call me and tell me what the plan is. I’m going to monitor this closely.”