The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (34 page)

“I don’t want you to be alone. I want to be with you. I laaah.”

“You can’t say it. I can’t say it.”

“I love you.”

She said it in room after room, at his elbow, at his throat. The more she said it, the more he pitied her. But she wouldn’t leave him alone. When he put on his coat, she put on hers. She stayed within a foot of him, and finally, as they were heading up the front walk moments after heading down it, he succumbed. “All right,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. George LeMaster was replacing a colored bulb on his front railing. Probst led Barbara inside and shut the door. “All right. I love you, too.”

She kissed his hand, but he pulled it away. He was beginning to feel betrayed. Barbara had defected to the world at large, to its optimisms, its smooth mechanisms of love and remorse, and like everyone else now she wanted to have Probst in her camp.

“You would have done the same thing in my shoes. I know you, I know you better than anyone. I know you would have.”

“So you say,” he said.

“Look at me and tell me you believe in perfect faithfulness. I dare you.”

Instead he went upstairs and changed his clothes, came down
and built a fire, and opened the front door. It was 3:30. Guests were arriving, all their favorite people, as if at a clap of Barbara’s hands. She’d timed her announcement well. Probst had no choice but to appear himself when he let the Montgomerys in. Jill and Bob bubbled. The dining-room table was laden with interesting cookies, fruits and vegetables, tiny sandwiches of Gruyère and roast beef. Barbara popped into view with her arms full of liquor bottles. Bob made a crack, turned to Probst, and started in with a story about a flat tire he’d had at midnight on the outer belt two nights ago.

The doorbell rang again and again. Cal Markham with a new girl named Nancy, Barbara’s college friend Lorri Wulkowicz, Barbara’s parents, both very tan. Sally and Fred Anderson and Probst’s secretary Carmen and her husband Eddie, who grinned and stammered. Peter Callahan, the widowed chief engineer, and his seventeen-year-old daughter Dana. More engineers, the Hoffingers, the Foxxes, the Waltons, the Joneses. Two of Barbara’s library coworkers and their husbands. People clustered around the fire, around the laughing Barbara and the smiling Probst. Small packages accumulated on the mantelpiece. The windows darkened. Cal volunteered to fetch more firewood, and Nancy joined Probst and Dana and Lorri Wulkowicz in the chairs by the piano. Lorri in particular warmed to Probst. She still wore the little round wireframed glasses she’d worn in the sixties. He watched her eat five Gruyère sandwiches between pulls on a bottle of Heineken. She’d recently been made chairman of her English department. It was a long time since she’d been in this house.

Good-bye and Merry Christmas. Probst retrieved coats and saw guests to the door. He kept returning to Lorri, who had gotten him started on the current political situation in the city. The phone rang. Barbara went to answer it and did not come back.

Now, towards six o’clock, only Lorri remains. Probst can hear Barbara in the kitchen on the phone. Lorri sits Indian style on the floor rolling her first cigarette of the afternoon. “That frumpy charisma,” she says. “She still seems totally Third World to me. The stupidest platitudes mean something, you know, they’re vital truths where she comes from. She’s got the imprimatur of struggle. And the ambiguities. On the one hand she has this naïve socialism. On
the other hand she’s probably a closet mobster like her cousin Indira.”

“Cousin?”

“Fifth? Eighth? Twelve times removed? You and
I
are cousins twelve times removed.”

“People romanticize her,” Probst says. “I romanticize her, too. What did you say—her charisma. A week ago I had myself completely convinced.” He shakes his head.

“No, go on.”

“I thought it meant something that she was an Indian, something to do with American Indians—”

“The so-called terrorists.”

“But superstitiously, too.” He explains.

Lorri tells him it’s simply literate behavior. “You can do numerology tricks, assign a number to each letter of your name. Birthplace, birth date, sign. I’m always rationalizing attractions—”

“I’m so-o-o-o sorry,” Barbara says, returning at last.

Lorri puts on her coat, which she has dropped on the floor behind a chair, kisses Probst and Barbara, and leaves with an invitation to return for dinner sometime after New Year’s.

“I like her,” Probst says.

“She likes you. She always has.”

Silence has fallen on the used glasses and sugared plates. For the first time in eighteen Christmas Eves the Probsts can do whatever they want. The traditional activity at this hour is Luisa’s opening of the gifts that come to Probst from his suppliers. “Maybe we should open some boxes,” he says.

The boxes are stacked against the southern wall of the den. He turns on the TV and waits for Barbara. The lead story on the KSLX local news is a visit to a North Side soup kitchen.

Barbara comes in wiping her hands. “Luisa and Duane are going to be at Mom and Dad’s tomorrow.”

“And it took you all that time to persuade them.”

“Yep.” She sits. “You don’t mind, I hope.”

“Why should I mind?”

“Minnie Sanders is sixty-three. Her only child, Leroy—”

“Duane’s parents are in St. Croix.”

Probst sniffs. “Is it my imagination, or is there something wrong with them?”

She doesn’t answer. He looks. Tears are streaming down her cheeks.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he says. “We’ll see her tomorrow.”

She shakes her head.

“You want me to call her?”

She stares at the TV, her hands on her lap, her face lined and wet. How very few tears she will have shed, Probst thinks, between growing up and dying. One cupful. Distantly the furnace comes to life.

Cliff Quinlan’s face is gray. Outdoor light shows up his gash-like dimples in high relief. “I’m standing on the southern city limits of St. Louis, behind me is the River des Peres, and beyond that, a quiet residential neighborhood in what is Bella Villa. In my first report I examined the dilemmas that the regional law-enforcement community faces in dealing with threats such as the ‘Osage Warriors.’ It was very close to where I stand now that the group crossed the river and escaped into the county. They are still at large.” Quinlan consults his text. “In my second report we saw how borders such as this one enable lawbreakers to enter and leave suburban neighborhoods with relative impunity, and how difficult it is to trace these lawbreakers in a county which is currently a hodgepodge of more than fifty independent police forces. The burglary rate in St. Louis County stands at an all-time high. However, for the last four months the city rate has been dropping steadily. Tonight: prospects for change.”

Probst turns off the TV. Barbara cries. He knows what’s on her mind, the whole matrix of Christmases with Luisa at eight, ten, twelve, sixteen. One girl who came in every size and every mood. He will grow sentimental and sorry for himself. On the floor between him and Barbara is a box of graphic imaginings: how she acted with John Nissing. Nissing’s vulgar language, his insinuating laughter. Who touched whom when. Whether Nissing was better. How much better.

Selecting boxes from the pile at random (for Luisa, opening these gifts was a science; for him, it’s a chore) he sits and slits tape
with a penknife. White styrofoam roaches come swarming out of the first box, along with an envelope. Seasons Greetings from Ickbey & Twoll, Fabricators. The roaches cling to his sweater. He brushes them off, but they stick to his fingers, eluding him, scooting around onto the back of his splinted hand, up onto his wrists. He has to pull them off one by one.

Inside the box is a clock radio. He writes
clock radio
on the card for the benefit of Carmen, who will write the thank-you’s.

Seasons Greetings from Thuringer Brothers: a five-pound tin of cashews. Seasons Greetings from Joe Katz, salesman for Variatech: a socket wrench set. Happy Holidays from Morton Seagrave:
The Soul of the Big Band Era
, Volume XII. Peace on Earth from Fulton Electric: a two-speed drill. Merry Christmas from Zakspeks: fruitcake. Seasons Greetings from Pulasky Maintenance: fruitcake. Merry Christmas from Dick Feinberg, Caterpillar salesman: a plaid half-gallon thermos and a matching blanket. Seasons Greetings from Camp & Weston: fruitcake.

“All right, Martin.”

“I think Luisa got more fun out of this than I do.”

Her skin smells wet with tears and sweet with booze when he kneels at her feet and leans towards her. She comes down off the sofa and puts her mouth on his and pushes, strokes, bites. He shuts his eyes. It’s last year. It’s no year. He touches her ribs and shoulder blades, and feels both comforted and alarmed by the ease with which he can control his behavior, by the arbitrariness of attitude. When they have nothing to fight over, nothing to strain against, necessity flags. What does it matter what they’ve done? What does it matter what they do? The evening is free.

An hour later there’s a carol outside the windows. The house transmits the tremors of footsteps from the front walk up to the bedroom. The doorbell rings. Probst kisses Barbara’s hair and stays to kiss her nose and eyes and fingertips.

Downstairs all the lights are shining on the remains of someone’s party. The chorus of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” is fading, losing hope, but when he opens the door the singers take heart. He recognizes none of the faces, young and old, smiling up at him. As they break into “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” Barbara
joins him in her robe. Even the children must know what the Probsts have been doing.

Although the streets of Webster Groves connect with those of its neighbors, and aside from Deer Creek in the north the town has no natural boundaries, its residents experience it as an enclosure, an area where Christmas can occur in safety. It’s a state of mind. A few people leave Webster Groves for the holidays, but many more come to it, by plane or train or car. And landscape recapitulates personality. There are no open fields, no high-rises or trailer parks or even shopping malls, no zones of negative potential into which spirit can drain. All houses are bright, and none stands alone. All streets interlock. Webster Acres, Webster Forest, Webster Ridge, Webster Hills, Webster Gardens, Webster Downs, Webster Woods, Webster Park, Webster Knolls, Webster Terrace, Webster Court. The air is full of woodsmoke, but the sky is clear. Born lucky, residents guess. This is a home that feels like home.

Even in the home of the Thompsons, Duane’s parents, creatures are stirring. They are burglars. They empty drawers onto floors, rip mattresses off beds, shoot flashlights into closets and cupboards. They have located the silver. They have spied a VCR. A heavy coin collection has come to light.

Watson Road, né U.S. 66, is neither crowded nor empty. Oldsmobiles and other stately forms move along it at discreet intervals. Stopped at the Sappington Road intersection, by a Crestwood Plaza just lately closed for the night and tomorrow, drivers in neckties smile at other drivers in neckties, or do not, depending. As it happens, Jack DuChamp does not. He is musing. Elaine sits in the front seat with him, and Laurie and Mark and Janet are in back. They’re driving to Elaine’s parents’ for supper. At midnight they will go to church; Laurie sings in the choir. Jack thinks how it’s only a short drive down Sappington Road into Webster. He thinks it might be a nifty idea, between activities, to pay a short surprise visit to Martin, even though Martin has said they’d have family in town. The house must be full of relatives. Still, a quick surprise visit…The five DuChamps could act like wassailers, sing a song on the stoop: a joke. Maybe get invited in. Or did
Martin and Barbara (God bless her) open their presents on Christmas Eve and not Christmas morning? Jack can’t remember. He has a great reluctance to disturb anyone opening presents.

“Green light, Dad.”

Jack steps on the gas.

At this moment more than half the human bodies in St. Louis have alcohol in their bloodstream. The city/county average body temperature is 98.63°F. Lipid counts are seasonably high. Three babies have been born in the last hour (two of them will be named Noel) and five adults have died, three of natural causes.

In a West End bar called Dexter’s, Singh has had two nervous drinks with a strapping young German on his way from Lübeck to Santa Barbara. Stefan is wearing a fisherman’s sweater and pants with leopard spots, a purple scarf and a cowboy hat. His hair is golden and the length of Jesus’s. He and Singh get acquainted in German, French, English, German; they like the rapid changes. But Singh can’t concentrate effectively in a place where he is too well known. He suggests a change of scene to Stefan, who repositions his hat and says sure. They obtain hot pastrami sandwiches at the 24-hour deli around the corner, and Singh soon has Stefan in his third apartment, fed and stripped. He takes the phone off the hook. He takes off his clothes. A quarter falls from his pants pocket. He flips it, and while it flashes in the smoky lighting, falling towards the carpet, he says “Heads or tails?” and Stefan giggles.