The Corrections

“What?”

“And it was a big mistake, evidently, not to give you all six.”

“What have you been taking?”

“Advil, darling.” Her tone with this endearment had moved beyond the arch to the outright ironic. “For saddle soreness?”

“I never asked you to get that drug,” he said.

“Not in so many words,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, a fat lot of fun we were going to have without it.”

Chip didn’t ask her to explain. He was afraid she meant he’d been a lousy, anxious lover until he took Mexican A. He had, of course, been a lousy, anxious lover; but he’d allowed himself to hope she hadn’t noticed. Under the weight of this fresh shame, and with no drug left in the room to alleviate it, he bowed his head and pressed his hands into his face. Shame was pushing down and rage was boiling up.

“Are you going to drive me to Westport?” Melissa said.

He nodded, but she must not have been looking at him, because he heard her flipping through a phone book. He heard her tell a dispatcher she needed a ride to New London. He heard her say: “The Comfort Valley Lodge. Room twenty-three.”

“I’ll drive you to Westport,” he said.

She shut the phone. “No, this is fine.”

“Melissa. Cancel the cab. I’ll drive you.”

She parted the room’s rear curtains, exposing a vista of Cyclone fencing, stick-straight maples, and the back side of a recycling plant. Eight or ten snowflakes drifted dismally. In the eastern sky was a raw patch where the cloud cover was abraded, the white sun wearing through. Chip dressed quickly while Melissa’s back was turned. If he hadn’t been so strangely full of shame, he might have gone to the window and put his hands on her, and she might have turned and forgiven him. But his hands felt predatory. He imagined her recoiling, and he wasn’t entirely convinced that some dark percentage of his being didn’t really want to rape her, to make her pay for liking herself in a way he couldn’t like himself. How he hated and how he loved the lilt in her voice, the bounce in her step, the serenity of her amour propre! She got to be her and he didn’t. And he could see that he was ruined—that he didn’t like her but would miss her disastrously.

She dialed another number. “Hey, love,” she said into her cell phone. “I’m on my way to New London. I’ll take the first train that comes … No, I just want to be with you guys … Totally … Yes, totally…OK, kiss kiss, I’ll see you when I see you … Yep.”

A car honked outside the door.

“There’s my cab,” she told her mother. “Right, OK. Kiss kiss. Bye.”

She shrugged into her jacket, lifted her bag, and waltzed across the room. At the door she announced in a general way that she was leaving. “I’ll see you later,” she said, almost looking at Chip.

He couldn’t figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up. He heard a cab door slam, an engine rumble. He went to the front window and got a glimpse of her cherrywood hair through the rear window of a red-and-white cab. He decided, after five years without, that the time had come to buy some cigarettes.

He put on a jacket and crossed expanses of cold asphalt indifferent to pedestrians. He pushed money through a slot in the bulletproof glass of a minimart.

It was the morning of Thanksgiving. The flurries had stopped and the sun was halfway out. A gull’s wings rattled and clacked. The breeze had a ruffly quality, it didn’t quite seem to touch the ground. Chip sat on a freezing guardrail and smoked and took comfort in the sturdy mediocrity of American commerce, the unpretending metal and plastic roadside hardware. The thunk of a gas-pump nozzle halting when a tank was filled, the humility and promptness of its service. And a 99¢ Big Gulp banner swelling with wind and sailing nowhere, its nylon ropes whipping and pinging on a galvanized standard. And the black sanserif numerals of gasoline prices, the company of so many 9s. And American sedans moving down the access road at nearly stationary speeds like thirty. And orange and yellow plastic pennants shivering overhead on guys.

“Dad fell down the basement stairs again,” Enid said while the rain came down in New York City. “He was carrying a big box of pecans to the basement and he didn’t hold the railing and he fell. Well, you can imagine how many pecans are in a twelve-pound box. Those nuts rolled everywhere. Denise, I spent half a day on my hands and knees. And I’m still finding them. They’re the same color as those crickets we can’t get rid of. I reach down to pick up a pecan, and it jumps in my face!”

Denise was trimming the stems of the sunflowers she’d brought. “Why was Dad carrying twelve pounds of pecans down the basement stairs?”

“He wanted a project he could work on in his chair. He was going to shell them.” Enid hovered at Denise’s shoulder. “Is there something I can do here?”

“You can find me a vase.”

The first cabinet that Enid opened contained a carton of wine-bottle corks and nothing else. “I don’t understand why Chip invited us here if he wasn’t even going to eat lunch with us.”

“Conceivably,” Denise said, “he didn’t plan on getting dumped this morning.”

Denise’s tone of voice was forever informing Enid that she was stupid. Denise was not, Enid felt, a very warm or giving person. However, Denise was a daughter, and a few weeks ago Enid had done a shameful thing that she was now in serious need of confessing to somebody, and she hoped Denise might be that person.

“Gary wants us to sell the house and move to Philadelphia,” she said. “Gary thinks Philadelphia makes sense because he’s there and you’re there and Chip’s in New York. I said to Gary, I love my children, but St. Jude is where I’m comfortable. Denise, I’m a midwesterner. I’d be lost in Philadelphia. Gary wants us to sign up for assisted living. He doesn’t understand that it’s already too late. Those places won’t let you in if you have a condition like Dad’s.”

“But if Dad keeps falling down the stairs.”

“Denise, he doesn’t hold the railing! He refuses to accept that he shouldn’t be carrying things on the stairs.”

Underneath the sink Enid found a vase behind a stack of framed photographs, four pictures of pinkish furry things, some sort of kooky art or medical photos. She tried to reach past them quietly, but she knocked over an asparagus steamer that she’d given Chip for Christmas once. As soon as Denise looked down, Enid could not pretend she hadn’t seen the pictures. “What on earth?” she said, scowling. “Denise, what are these?”

“What do you mean, ‘what are these?’?”

“Some sort of kooky thing of Chip’s, I guess.”

Denise had an “amused” expression that drove Enid crazy. “Obviously you know what they are, though.”

“No. I don’t.”

“You don’t know what they are?”

Enid took the vase out and closed the cabinet. “I don’t want to know,” she said.

“Well, that’s something else entirely.”

In the living room, Alfred was summoning the courage to sit down on Chip’s chaise longue. Not ten minutes ago, he’d sat down on it without incident. But now, instead of simply doing it again, he’d stopped to think. He’d realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall. His excellent blue chair in St. Jude was like a first baseman’s glove that gently gathered in whatever body was flung its way, at whatever glancing angle, with whatever violence; it had big helpful ursine arms to support him while he performed the crucial blind pivot. But Chip’s chaise was a low-riding, impractical antique. Alfred stood facing away from it and hesitated, his knees bent to the rather small degree that his neuropathic lower legs permitted, his hands scooping and groping in the air behind him. He was afraid to take the plunge. And yet there was something obscene about standing half-crouched and quaking, some association with the men’s room, some essential vulnerability which felt to him at once so poignant and degraded that, simply to put an end to it, he shut his eyes and let go. He landed heavily on his bottom and continued on over backwards, coming to rest with his knees in the air above him.

“Al, are you all right?” Enid called.

“I don’t understand this furniture,” he said, struggling to sit up and sound powerful. “Is this meant to be a sofa?”

Denise came out and put a vase of three sunflowers on the spindly table by the chaise. “It’s like a sofa,” she said. “You can put your legs up and be a French philosophe. You can talk about Schopenhauer.”

Alfred shook his head.

Enid enunciated from the kitchen doorway, “Dr. Hedgpeth says you should only sit in high, straight-backed chairs.”

Since Alfred showed no interest in these instructions, Enid repeated them to Denise when she returned to the kitchen. “High, straight-backed chairs only,” she said. “But Dad won’t listen. He insists on sitting in his leather chair. Then he shouts for me to come and help him get up. But if I hurt my back, then where are we? I put one of those nice old ladder-back chairs by the TV downstairs and told him sit here. But he’d rather sit in his leather chair, and then to get out of it he slides down the cushion until he’s on the floor. Then he crawls on the floor to the Ping-Pong table and uses the Ping-Pong table to hoist himself up.”

“That’s actually pretty resourceful,” Denise said as she took an armload of food from the refrigerator.

“Denise, he’s crawling across the floor. Rather than sit in a nice, comfortable straight-backed chair which the doctor says it’s important that he sit in, he crawls across the floor. He shouldn’t be sitting so much to begin with. Dr. Hedgpeth says his condition is not at all severe if he would just get out and do a little. Use it or lose it, that’s what every doctor says. Dave Schumpert has had ten times more health problems than Dad, he’s had a colostomy for fifteen years, he’s got one lung and a pacemaker, and look at all the things that he and Mary Beth are doing. They just got back from snorkeling in Fiji! And Dave never complains, never complains. You probably don’t remember Gene Grillo, Dad’s old friend from Hephaestus, but he has bad Parkinson’s—much, much worse than Dad’s. He’s still at home in Fort Wayne but in a wheelchair now. He’s really in awful shape, but, Denise, he’s interested in things. He can’t write anymore but he sent us an ‘audio letter’ on a cassette tape, really thoughtful, where he talks about each of his grandchildren in detail, because he knows his grandkids and takes an interest in them, and about how he’s started to teach himself Cambodian, which he calls Khmer, from listening to a tape and watching the Cambodian (or Khmer, I guess) TV channel in Fort Wayne, because their youngest son is married to a Cambodian woman, or Khmer, I guess, and her parents don’t speak any English and Gene wants to be able to talk to them a little. Can you believe? Here Gene is in a wheelchair, completely crippled, and he’s still thinking about what he can do for somebody else! While Dad, who can walk, and write, and dress himself, does nothing all day but sit in his chair.”

“Mother, he’s depressed,” Denise said in a low voice, slicing bread.

“That’s what Gary and Caroline say, too. They say he’s depressed and he should take a medication. They say he was a workaholic and that work was a drug which when he couldn’t have it anymore he got depressed.”

“So drug him and forget him. A convenient theory.”

“That’s not fair to Gary.”

“Don’t get me started on Gary and Caroline.”

“Golly, Denise, the way you throw that knife around I don’t see how you haven’t lost a finger.”

From the end of a French loaf Denise had made three little crust-bottomed vehicles. On one she set shavings of butter curved like sails full of wind, into another she loaded Parmesan shards packed in an excelsior of shredded arugula, and the third she paved with minced olive meat and olive oil and covered with a thick red tarp of pepper.

Enid spoke—“Mm, don’t those look nice”—as she reached, cat-quick, for the plate on which Denise had arranged the snacks. But the plate eluded Enid.

“These are for Dad.”

“Just a corner of one.”

“I’ll make some more for you.”

“No, I just want one corner of his.”

But Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; and no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip’s living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things.

“Something to tide you while I get lunch,” Denise said.

Alfred gazed with gratitude at the snacks, which were holding about ninety percent steady as food, flickering only occasionally into objects of similar size and shape.

“Maybe you’d like a glass of wine?”

“Not necessary,” he said. As the gratitude spread outward from his heart—as he was moved—his clasped hands and lower arms began to bounce more freely on his lap. He tried to find something in the room that didn’t move him, something he could rest his eyes on safely; but because the room was Chip’s and because Denise was standing in it, every fixture and every surface—even a radiator knob, even a thigh-level expanse of faintly scuffed wall—was a reminder of the separate, eastern worlds in which his children led their lives and hence of the various vast distances that separated him from them; which made his hands shake all the more.

That the daughter whose attentions most aggravated his affliction was the person he least wanted to be seen by in the grip of this affliction was the sort of Devil’s logic that confirmed a man’s pessimism.

“I’ll leave you alone for a minute,” Denise said, “while I get the lunch going.”

He closed his eyes and thanked her. As if waiting for a break in a downpour so that he could run from his car into a grocery store, he waited for a lull in his tremor so that he could reach out and safely eat what she’d brought him.

His affliction offended his sense of ownership. These shaking hands belonged to nobody but him, and yet they refused to obey him. They were like bad children. Unreasoning two-year-olds in a tantrum of selfish misery. The more sternly he gave orders, the less they listened and the more miserable and out of control they got. He’d always been vulnerable to a child’s recalcitrance and refusal to behave like an adult. Irresponsibility and undiscipline were the bane of his existence, and it was another instance of that Devil’s logic that his own untimely affliction should consist of his body’s refusal to obey him.

If thy right hand offend thee, Jesus said, cut it off.

As he waited for the tremor to abate—as he watched his hands’ jerking rowing motions impotently, as if he were in a nursery with screaming misbehaving infants and had lost his voice and couldn’t make them quiet down—Alfred took pleasure in the imagination of chopping his hand off with a hatchet: of letting the transgressing limb know how deeply he was angry with it, how little he loved it if it insisted on disobeying him. It brought a kind of ecstasy to imagine the first deep bite of the hatchet’s blade in the bone and muscle of his offending wrist; but along with the ecstasy, right beside it, was an inclination to weep for this hand that was his, that he loved and wished the best for, that he’d known all its life.

He was thinking about Chip again without noticing it.

He wondered where Chip had gone. How he’d driven Chip away again.

Denise’s voice and Enid’s voice in the kitchen were like a larger bee and a smaller bee trapped behind a window screen. And his moment came, the lull that he’d been waiting for. Leaning forward and steadying his taking hand with his supporting hand, he grasped the butter-sailed schooner and got it off the plate, bore it aloft without capsizing it, and then, as it floated and bobbed, he opened his mouth and chased it down and got it. Got it. Got it. The crust cut his gums, but he kept the whole thing in his mouth and chewed carefully, giving his sluggish tongue wide berth. The sweet butter melting, the feminine softness of baked leavened wheat. There were chapters in Hedgpeth’s booklets that even Alfred, fatalist and man of discipline that he was, couldn’t bring himself to read. Chapters devoted to the problems of swallowing; to the late torments of the tongue; to the final breakdown of the signal system…

The betrayal had begun in Signals.

The Midland Pacific Railroad, where for the last decade of his career he’d run the Engineering Department (and where, when he’d given an order, it was carried out, Mr. Lambert, right away, sir), had served hundreds of one-elevator towns in west Kansas and west and central Nebraska, towns of the kind that Alfred and his fellow executives had grown up in or near, towns that in their old age seemed the sicker for the excellent health of the Midpac tracks running through them. Although the railroad’s first responsibility was to its stockholders, its Kansan and Missourian officers (including Mark Jamborets, the corporation counsel) had persuaded the Board of Managers that because a railroad was a pure monopoly in many hinterland towns, it had a civic duty to maintain service on its branches and spurs. Alfred personally had no illusions about the economic future of prairie towns where the median age was fifty-plus, but he believed in rail and he hated trucks, and he knew firsthand what scheduled service meant to a town’s civic pride, how the whistle of a train could raise the spirits on a February morning at 41°N 101°W; and in his battles with the EPA and various DOTs he’d learned to appreciate rural state legislators who could intercede on your behalf when you needed more time to clean up your waste-oil tanks in the Kansas City yards, or when some goddamned bureaucrat was insisting that you pay for forty percent of a needless grade-separation project at Country Road H. Years after the Soo Line and Great Northern and Rock Island had stranded dead and dying towns all across the northern Plains, then, the Midpac had persisted in running short semiweekly or even biweekly trains through places like Alvin and Pisgah Creek, New Chartres and West Centerville.

Unfortunately, this program had attracted predators. In the early 1980s, as Alfred neared retirement, the Midpac was known as a regional carrier that despite outstanding management and lush profit margins on its long-haul lines had very ordinary earnings. The Midpac had already repulsed one unwelcome suitor when it came under the acquisitive gaze of Hillard and Chauncy Wroth, fraternal twin brothers from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who had expanded a family meat-packing business into an empire of the dollar. Their company, the Orfic Group, included a chain of hotels, a bank in Atlanta, an oil company, and the Arkansas Southern Railroad. The Wroths had lopsided faces and dirty hair and no discernible desires or interests apart from making money; Oak Ridge Raiders, the financial press called them. At an early exploratory meeting that Alfred attended, Chauncy Wroth persisted in addressing the Midpac’s CEO as “Dad”: I’m well aware it don’t seem like “fair play” to you, DAD … Well, DAD, why don’t you and your lawyers go ahead and have that little chat right now … Gosh, and here Hillard and myself was under the impression, DAD, that you’re operating a business, not a charity … This kind of anti-paternalism played well with the railroad’s unionized workforce, which after months of arduous negotiations voted to offer the Wroths a package of wage and work-rule concessions worth almost $200 million; with these prospective savings in hand, plus twenty-seven percent of the railroad’s stock, plus limitless junk financing, the Wroths made an irresistible tender offer and bought the railroad outright. A former Tennessee highway commissioner, Fenton Creel, was hired to merge the railroad with the Arkansas Southern. Creel shut down the Midpac’s headquarters in St. Jude, fired or retired a third of its employees, and moved the rest to Little Rock.

Alfred retired two months before his sixty-fifth birthday. He was at home watching Good Morning America in his new blue chair when Mark Jamborets, the Midpac’s retired corporation counsel, called with the news that a sheriff in New Chartres (pronounced “Charters”), Kansas, had had himself arrested for shooting an employee of Orfic Midland. “The sheriff’s name is Bryce Halstrom,” Jamborets told Alfred. “He got a call that some roughnecks were trashing Midpac signal wires. He went over to the siding and saw three fellows ripping down the wire, smashing signal boxes, coiling up anything copper. One of them took a county bullet in his hip before the others made Halstrom understand they were working for the Midpac. Hired for copper salvage at sixty cents a pound.”

“But that’s a good new system,” Alfred said. “It’s not three years since we upgraded the whole New Chartres spur.”

“The Wroths are scrapping everything but the trunk lines,” Jamborets said. “They’re junking the Glendora cutoff! You think the Atchison, Topeka wouldn’t make a bid on that?”

“Well,” Alfred said.

“It’s a Baptist morality gone sour,” said Jamborets. “The Wroths can’t abide that we admitted any principle but the ruthless pursuit of profit. I’m telling you: they hate what they can’t comprehend. And now they’re sowing salt in the fields. Close down headquarters in St. Jude? When we’re twice the size of Arkansas Southern? They’re punishing St. Jude for being the home of the Midland Pacific. And Creel’s punishing the towns like New Chartres for being Midpac towns. He’s sowing salt in the fields of the financially unrighteous.”

“Well,” Alfred said again, his eyes drawn to his new blue chair and its delicious potential as a sleep site. “Not my concern anymore.”

But he’d worked for thirty years to make the Midland Pacific a strong system, and Jamborets continued to call him and send him news reports of fresh Kansan outrages, and it all made him very sleepy. Soon hardly a branch or spur in Midpac’s western district remained in service, but apparently Fenton Creel was satisfied with pulling down the signal wires and gutting the boxes. Five years after the takeover, the rails were still in place, the right-of-way was undisposed of. Only the copper nervous system, in an act of corporate self-vandalism, had been dismantled.

“And now I’m worried about our health insurance,” Enid told Denise. “Orfic Midland is switching all the old Midpac employees to managed care no later than April. I have to find an HMO that has some of Dad’s and my doctors on their list. I’m deluged with prospectuses, where the differences are all in the fine print, and honestly, Denise, I don’t think I can handle this.”

As if to forestall being asked for help, Denise quickly said: “What plans does Hedgpeth accept?”

“Well, except for his old fee-for-service patients, like Dad, he’s exclusive now with Dean Driblett’s HMO,” Enid said. “I told you about the big party at Dean’s gorgeous, huge new house. Dean and Trish really are about the nicest young couple I know, but golly, Denise, I called his company last year after Dad fell down on the lawn mower, and you know what they wanted for cutting our little lawn? Fifty-five dollars a week! I’m not opposed to profit, I think it’s wonderful that Dean’s successful, I told you about his trip to Paris with Honey, I’m not saying anything against him. But fifty-five dollars a week!”