Oh, get fucked, he told Jud’s voice rudely. I’ve learned to accept a great many strange things in the last ten months, my good old friend. But am I ready to believe that a haunted patch of ground can influence airline ticketing? I don’t think so.
“I’ll have to pack,” Rachel said. She was looking at the flight information Louis had jotted down on the pad by the phone.
“Take just the one big suitcase,” Louis said.
She looked at, him wide-eyed, mildly startled. “For both of us?
Louis, you’re joking.”
“All right, take a couple of tote bags too. But don’t exhaust yourself packing a different outfit for the next three weeks,” he said, thinking, Especially since you may be back in Ludlow very soon. “Take enough for a week, ten days. You’ve got the checkbook and the credit cards. Buy what you need.”
“But we can’t afford—” she began doubtfully. She seemed doubtful about everything now, malleable, easily confused. He remembered her odd, dangling comment about the Winnebago he had once spoken idly about buying.
“We have the money,” he said.
“Well . . . I suppose we could use Gage’s college fund if we needed to, although it would take a day or two to process the savings account and a week to get the treasury bills cashed—”
Her face began to crumple and dissolve again. Louis held her.
She’s right. It just keeps right on hitting you, it never lets up.
“Rachel, don’t,” he said. “Don’t cry.”
But of course she did—she had to.
While she was upstairs packing, the phone rang. Louis sprang for it, thinking it would be someone from Delta ticketing, saying a mistake had been made, no flights were available. I should have known everything was going too smoothly.
But it wasn’t Delta ticketing. It was Irwin Goldman.
“I’ll get Rachel,” Louis said.
“No.” For a moment there was nothing else, only silence. He’s probably sitting there and trying to decide which name to call you first.
When Goldman spoke again, his voice was strained. He seemed to be pushing the words out against some great inner resistance. “It’s you I want to talk to. Dory wanted me to call and apologize for my.
. . for my behavior. I guess. . . Louis, I guess I wanted to apologize too.”
Why, Irwin! How big of you! My God, I think I just wet my pants!
“You don’t need to apologize,” Louis said. His voice was dry and mechanical.
“What I did was inexcusable,” Goldman said. Now he did not just seem to be pushing the words out; he seemed to be coughing them out. “You suggesting that Rachel and Eileen come out has made
me see what a big man you have been about this. . . and how small I have been.”
There was something very familiar in this rap, something eerily familiar. Then he got it, and his mouth suddenly pulled together in a tight pucker, as if he had bitten straight through a plump yellow lemon. Rachel’s way—she was completely unaware of it, Louis was sure—of saying contritely, Louis, I’m sorry I was such a bitch, after her bitchiness had gotten her her own way about something she really wanted. Here was that voice—robbed of Rachel’s liveliness and merriness, true—but that same voice saying, I’m sorry 1 was such a bastard, Louis.
The old man was getting his daughter and granddaughter back; they were running home from Maine to Daddy. Courtesy of Delta and United, they were coming back to where they belonged, back to where Irwin Goldman wanted them. Now he could afford to be magnanimous. As far as old Irwin knew, he had won. So let’s just forget that I took a swing at you over your dead son’s body, Louis, or that I kicked you when you were down, or that I knocked his coffin off its bier and snapped the latch so you could see—or think you saw—that one last flash of your child’s hand. Let’s forget all of that. Let bygones be bygones.
Terrible as it may be, Irwin, you old prick, I’d wish for you to drop dead right this second, if it wouldn’t screw up my plans.
“That’s all right, Mr. Goldman,” he said evenly. “It was . well. . .
an emotional day for all of us.”
“It was not all right,” he persisted, and Louis realized— although he did not want to—that Goldman was not just being political, was not just saying that he was sorry he had been such a bastard now that he was getting his own way. The man was nearly weeping, and he was speaking with a slow and trembling urgency. “It was a terrible day for all of us. Thanks to me.
Thanks to a stupid, bullheaded old man. I hurt my daughter when she needed my help . . . I hurt you, and maybe you needed my help too, Louis. That you do this. . . behave this way after I behaved that way. . . it makes me feel like garbage. And I think that is just the way I should feel.”
Oh let him stop this, let him stop before 1 start to scream at him and blow the whole deal.
“Rachel’s probably told you, Louis, we had another daughter—”
“Zelda,” Louis said. “Yes, she told me about Zelda.”
“It was difficult,” Goldman said in that trembling voice. “Difficult for all of us. Most difficult for Rachel, perhaps—Rachel was there when Zelda died—but difficult for Dory and me too. Dory almost had a breakdown—”
What do you think Rachel had? Louis wanted to shout. Do you think a kid can’t have a nervous breakdown? Twenty years later she’s still jumping at death’s shadow. And now this happens. This miserable, awful thing. It’s a minor miracle that she isn’t in the fucking hospital, being fed through an I.V. tube. So don’t talk to me about how difficult it was for you and your wife, you bastard.
“Ever since Zelda died, we have. . . I suppose we have clung to Rachel. . . always wanting to protect her. . . and to make it up to her. Make up for the problems she had with her . . . her back. . . for years afterward. Make up for not being there.”
Yes, the old man was really crying. Why did he have to be crying?
It made it harder for Louis to hold on to his clean, pure hate. More difficult, but not impossible. He deliberately called up the image of Goldman reaching into the pocket of his smoking jacket for his overflowing checkbook . . . but he suddenly saw Zelda Goldman in the background, an unquiet ghost in a stinking bed, her cheesy face
full of spite and agony, her hands pulled into claws. The Goldman ghost. Oz the Gweat and Tewwible.
“Please,” he said. “Please, Mr. Goldman. Irwin. No more. Let’s not make things any worse than they have to be, okay?”
“I believe now that you are a good man and that I misjudged you, Louis. Oh, listen, I know what you think. Am I that stupid? No.
Stupid, but not that stupid. You think I’m saying all of this because now I can, you’re thinking oh yeah, he’s getting what he wants and once he tried to buy me off, but . . . but Louis, I swear. . .“
“No more,” Louis said gently. “I can’t. . . I really can’t take any more.” Now his voice was trembling as well. “Okay?”
“All right,” Goldman said and sighed. Louis thought it was a sigh of relief. “But let me say again that I apologize. You don’t have to accept it. But that is what I called to say, Louis. I apologize.”
“All right,” Louis said. He closed his eyes. His head was thudding.
“Thank you, Irwin. Your apology is accepted.”
“Thank you,” Goldman said. “And thank you . . . for letting them come. Perhaps it is what they both need. We’ll wait for them at the airport.”
“Fine,” Louis said, and an idea suddenly occurred to him. It was crazy and attractive in its very sanity. He would let bygones be bygones. . . and he would let Gage lie in his Pleasantview grave.
Instead of trying to reopen a door that had swung shut, he would latch it and double-bolt it and throw away the key. He would do just what he had told his wife he was going to do: tidy up their affairs here and catch a plane back to Shytown. They would perhaps spend the entire summer there, he and his wife and his good-hearted daughter. They would go to the zoo and the planetarium and boating on the lake. He would take Ellie to the top of the Sears Tower and show her the Midwest stretching away like a great fiat gameboard, rich and dreaming. Then when mid-August
came, they would come back to this house which now seemed so sad and so shadowy, and perhaps it would be like starting over again. Perhaps they could begin weaving from fresh thread. What was on the Creed loom right now was ugly, splattered with drying blood.