Saul and Patsy Read Online Free PDF

his wife out to this godforsaken place. The trouble with Patsy was that she said she liked it fine in Five Oaks. She could be sanctimonious about her adaptability. All he could do was hold on to her and wait for the hours to pass.
    If anything should happen to her, he thought, he would surely die.
    He climbed to the roof of the house to correct quizzes and tests. Staring out over the fields, he felt his attention disperse into the landscape, floating gradually into the topsoil, like pollen. Then he would look down and underline a sentence fragment in green ink.
    Saul’s mother, Delia, had lost her husband, Saul’s father, Norman, to a premature heart attack some years ago, when Howie had been eight years old and Saul ten. In a traffic jam outside Baltimore, Norman Bernstein had died quietly and submissively inside his Buick, his head slumped over the wheel, his car clogging the already clogged arterial-highway. Thinking of this, Saul sometimes imagined his father’s coronary thrombosis producing a traffic thrombosis, blocking the flow of vehicles for hours. His self-effacing father would have hated his own death for its public-nuisance value. He would have preferred to die in a private manner that would have bothered no one.
    As for Delia, Saul’s mother had had a wild youth, Saul had understood from one or two family friends who had reported that she had been a real “firecracker,” but he also inferred from her indifferent manner of talking about her husband that the marriage had been a convenience of sorts, a way of starting a family with a reliable man, a means of avoiding loneliness; and his father’s death, while certainly a shock, had not plunged her into mind-numbing grief. She had traded passion for reliability, and when a reliable man dies, he leaves behind a sufficiently huge sum of life-insurance money to take care of everybody, and Saul’s father had done exactly that. Saul missed his dull, sweet, and reliable father the way a child misses a favorite dog, but every time he tried to speak to his mother (who was still, after all, in her mid-forties) about his dad, she listened carefully but did not participate in his sorrow, perhaps on principle.
    Musing about his mother, Saul recognized that she missed high school (not college, as he did) and the grand passions more than she missed her husband, who had been, in romance, a utility player. There was still an out-of-control quality to her emotions, an uncapped heat coming from her furnace heart that Saul was afraid of, both for her and himself. In her marriage, his mother had been undermatched. She was ready for a wonderful midlife crisis, and Saul was bracing himself for it.
    Whenever she called, she disparaged the Midwest, and Saul’s career choice, though she was careful never to criticize Patsy, or Saul and Patsy’s unseemly love for each other. She would praise, incomprehensibly, Saul’s brother, and always refer to Howie’s good looks and his parade of girlfriends—Saul suspected his brother had boyfriends as well—and his income. It was as if Saul and Patsy’s marriage, with its crazy love, was an error in taste or judgment; it lacked the interesting variety to be found in Howie’s succession of bedmates. It lacked anecdotal value. If Saul would only return to Baltimore, his mother intimated, perhaps she could set him straight.
    “Ma,” he said. “We’re staying here.” Any suggestion from his mother, no matter how sensible, had to be rejected, simply because it came from
her.
    “Staying? Staying for what? For how long?”
    “For as long as it takes.”
    “As long as what takes? Honey, you’ll never have a normal life as long as you live there.”
    “What’s normal? Explain that to me.”
    “Ah, now you’re setting one of your traps. I know your tricks. You want me to say restaurants and concerts and good movies and book-stores, but I won’t.”
    “They have some of those things here.”
    “I didn’t say it!”
She waited.