The Corrections

their entire visit. Chip was a tall, gym-built man with crow’s-feet and sparsebutter-yellow hair; if the girl had noticed him, she might have thought he was a little too old for the leather he was wearing. As she hurried past him, he pulled harder on his rivet to offset the pain of her departure from his life forever and to focus his attention on his father, whose face was brightening at the discovery of a son among so many strangers. In the lunging manner of a man floundering in water, Alfred fell upon Chip and grabbed Chip’s hand and wrist as if they were a rope he’d been thrown. “Well!” he said. “Well!”
    Enid came limping up behind him. “Chip,” she cried, “what have you done to your ears ?”
    “Dad, Mom,” Chip murmured through his teeth, hoping the azure-haired girl was out of earshot. “Good to see you.”
    He had time for one subversive thought about his parents’ Nordic Pleasurelines shoulder bags—either Nordic Pleasurelines sent bags like these to every booker of its cruises as a cynical means of getting inexpensive walk-about publicity or as a practical means of tagging the cruise participants for greater ease of handling at embarkation points or as a benign means of building esprit de corps; or else Enid and Alfred had deliberately saved the bags from some previous Nordic Pleasurelines cruise and, out of a misguided sense of loyalty, had chosen to carry them on their upcoming cruise as well; and in either case Chip was appalled by his parents’ willingness to make themselves vectors of corporate advertising—before he shouldered the bags himself and assumed the burden of seeing LaGuardia Airport and New York City and his life and clothes and body through the disappointed eyes of his parents.
    He noticed, as if for the first time, the dirty linoleum, the assassinlike chauffeurs holding up signs with other people’s names on them, the snarl of wires dangling from a hole in the ceiling. He distinctly heard the word “motherfucker.” Outside the big windows on the baggage level, twoBangladeshi men were pushing a disabled cab through rain and angry honking.
    “We have to be at the pier by four,” Enid said to Chip. “And I think Dad was hoping to see your desk at the Wall Street Journal .” She raised her voice. “Al? Al?”
    Though stooped in the neck now, Alfred was still an imposing figure. His hair was white and thick and sleek, like a polar bear’s, and the powerful long muscles of his shoulders, which Chip remembered laboring in the spanking of a child, usually Chip himself, still filled the gray tweed shoulders of his sport coat.
    “Al, didn’t you say you wanted to see where Chip worked?” Enid shouted.
    Alfred shook his head. “There’s no time.”
    The baggage carousel circulated nothing.
    “Did you take your pill?” Enid said.
    “Yes,” Alfred said. He closed his eyes and repeated slowly, “I took my pill. I took my pill. I took my pill.”
    “Dr. Hedgpeth has him on a new medication,” Enid explained to Chip, who was quite certain that his father had not, in fact, expressed interest in seeing his office. And since Chip had no association with the Wall Street Journal —the publication to which he made unpaid contributions was the Warren Street Journal: A Monthly of the Transgressive Arts ; he’d also very recently completed a screenplay, and he’d been working part-time as a legal proofreader at Bragg Knuter & Speigh for the nearly two years since he’d lost his assistant professorship in Textual Artifacts at D——College, in Connecticut, as a result of an offense involving a female undergraduate which had fallen just short of the legally actionable and which, though his parents never learned of it, had interrupted the parade of accomplishments that his mother could brag about, back home in St. Jude; he’d told his parents that he’d quit teaching in order to pursue a career in writing, and when, more recently, his mother had pressedhim for details, he’d mentioned the Warren Street Journal , the name of which his mother had misheard and instantly begun to trumpet to her friends Esther Root and Bea Meisner and Mary Beth Schumpert, and though Chip in his monthly phone calls home had had many opportunities to disabuse her he’d instead actively fostered the misunderstanding; and here things became rather complex, not only because the Wall Street Journal was available in St. Jude and his mother had never mentioned looking for his work and