The Corrections

that Enid would be more willing to leave St. Jude and move east if she’d had her “one last Christmas.” Basically, he was prepared to make the trip, and he expected a modicum of cooperation from his wife: a mature willingness to consider the special circumstances.
    He shut himself inside his study and locked the door against the shouts and whimpers of his family, the barrage of feet on stairs, the pseudo-emergency. He lifted the receiver of his study phone and turned off the cordless.
    “This is ridiculous,” Enid said in a defeated voice. “Why don’t you call me back?”
    “We haven’t quite decided about December,” he said, “but we may very well come to St. Jude. In which case, I think you should stop here after the cruise.”
    Enid was breathing rather loudly. “We’re not making two trips to Philadelphia this fall,” she said. “And I want to see the boys at Christmas, and so as far as I’m concerned this means you’re coming to St. Jude.”
    “No, Mother,” he said. “No, no, no. We haven’t decided anything.”
    “I promised Jonah—”
    “Jonah’s not buying the tickets. Jonah’s not in charge here. So you make your plans, we’ll make ours, and hopefully everything will work out.”
    Gary could hear, with strange clarity, the rustle of dissatisfaction from Enid’s nostrils. He could hear the seashore of her respiration, and all at once he realized.
    “ Caroline? ” he said. “ Caroline, are you on the line? ”
    The breathing ceased.
    “ Caroline, are you eavesdropping? Are you on the line? ”
    He heard a faint electronic click, a spot of static.
    “Mom, sorry—”
    Enid: “What on earth?”
    Unbelievable! Unfuckingbelievable! Gary dropped the receiver on his desk, unlocked the door, and ran down the hallway past a bedroom in which Aaron was standing at his mirror with his brow wrinkled and his head at the Flattering Angle, past the main staircase on which Caleb was clutchinghis catalogue like a Jehovah’s Witness with a pamphlet, to the master bedroom where Caroline was curled up fetally on a Persian rug, in her muddy clothes, a frosty gelpack pressed into her lower back.
    “ Are you eavesdropping on me? ”
    Caroline shook her head weakly, perhaps hoping to suggest that she was too infirm to have reached the phone by the bed.
    “Is that a no? You’re saying no? You weren’t listening?”
    “No, Gary,” she said in a tiny voice.
    “I heard the click, I heard the breathing—”
    “No.”
    “Caroline, there are three phones on this line, I’ve got two of them in my study, and the third one’s right here. Hello?”
    “I wasn’t eavesdropping. I just picked up the phone—” She inhaled through gritted teeth. “To see if the line was free. That’s all.”
    “And sat and listened! You were eavesdropping! Like we’ve talked and talked and talked about not doing!”
    “Gary,” she said in a piteous little voice, “I swear to you I wasn’t. My back is killing me. I couldn’t reach to put the phone back for a minute. I put it on the floor. I wasn’t eavesdropping. Please be nice to me.”
    That her face was beautiful and that the agony in it was mistakable for ecstasy—that the sight of her doubled-over and mud-spattered and red-cheeked and vanquished and wild-haired on the Persian rug turned him on; that some part of him believed her denials and was full of tenderness for her—only deepened his feeling of betrayal. He stormed back up the hall to his study and slammed the door. “Mother, hello, I’m sorry.”
    But the line was dead. He had to dial St. Jude now at his own expense. Through the window overlooking the back yard he could see sunlit, clamshell-purple rain clouds, steam rising off the monkey puzzle tree.
    Because she wasn’t paying for the call, Enid sounded happier. She asked Gary if he’d heard of a company called Axon. “It’s in Schwenksville, Pennsylvania,” she said. “They want to buy Dad’s patent. Here, I’ll read you the letter. I’m a little upset about this.”
    At CenTrust Bank, where Gary now ran the Equities Division, he’d long specialized in large-cap securities and never much concerned himself with small fry. The name Axon was not familiar to him. But as he listened to his mother read the letter from Mr. Joseph K. Prager at Bragg Knuter & Speigh, he felt he knew these people’s game. It was clear that the lawyer, in drafting a letter and sending it to an old man with a midwestern address, had offered Alfred no