Freedom

“It’s not actually your business whether I talk to her.”

“It is so my business, and I’m telling you to leave her alone. You’ll just get her confused.”

“This is the person whose IQ is, like, one-eighty?”

“She’s not doing well since Daddy died, and there’s no reason to go tormenting her. I doubt you’ll listen to me, but I know what I’m talking about, having spent approximately a thousand times more time with Ronnie than you have. Try to be a little considerate.”

The once-manicured old Emerson estate, when Patty went out there the next morning, looked like some cross between Walker Evans and nineteenth-century Russia. A cow was standing in the middle of the tennis court, now netless, its plastic boundary lines torn and twisted. Edgar was plowing up the old horse pasture with a little tractor, slowing to a standstill every fifty feet or so when the tractor bogged down in the rain-soaked spring soil. He was wearing a muddy white shirt and mud-caked rubber boots; he’d put on a lot of fat and muscle and somehow reminded Patty of Pierre in War and Peace. He left the tractor tilting severely in the field and waded over through mud to the driveway where she’d parked. He explained that he was putting in potatoes, lots of potatoes, in a bid to make his family more perfectly self-sufficient in the coming year. Currently, it being spring, with last year’s harvest and venison supplies exhausted, the family was relying heavily on food gifts from the Congregation Beit Midrash: on the ground outside the barn door were cartons of canned goods, wholesale quantities of dry cereal, and shrink-wrapped flats of baby food. Some of the flats were opened and partly depleted, giving Patty the impression that the food had been standing in the elements for some time without being carried into the barn.

Although the house was a mess of toys and unwashed dishes and did indeed smell faintly of manure, the Renoir pastel and the Degas sketch and the Monet canvas were still hanging where they always had. Patty was immediately handed a nice, warm, adorable, not terribly clean one-year-old by Galina, who was very pregnant and surveyed the scene with dull sharecropper eyes. Patty had met Galina on the day of Ray’s memorial service but had barely spoken to her. She was one of those overwhelmed mothers engulfed in baby, her hair disordered, her cheeks hectic, her clothes disarranged, her flesh escaping haphazardly, but she clearly could still have been pretty if she’d had a few minutes to spare for it. “Thank you for coming to see us,” she said. “It’s an ordeal for us to travel now, arranging rides and so forth.”

Patty, before she could proceed with her business, had to enjoy the little boy in her arms, rub noses with him, get him laughing. She had the mad thought that she could adopt him, lighten Galina and Edgar’s load, and embark on a new kind of life. As if recognizing this in her, he put her hands all over her face, pulling at her features gleefully.

“He likes his aunt,” Galina said. “His long-lost aunt Patty.”

Edgar came in through the back door minus his boots, wearing thick gray socks that were themselves muddy and had holes in them. “Do you want some raisin bran or something?” he said. “We also have Chex.”

Patty declined and sat down at the kitchen table, her nephew on her knee. The other kids were no less great—dark-eyed, curious, bold without being rude—and she could see why Joyce was so taken with them and didn’t want them leaving the country. All in all, after her bad talk with Abigail, Patty was having a hard time seeing this family as the villains. They seemed, instead, literally, like babes in the woods. “So tell me how you guys see the future working out,” she said.

Edgar, obviously accustomed to letting Galina speak for him, sat picking scabs of mud off his socks while she explained that they were getting better at farming, that their rabbi and synagogue were wonderfully supportive, that Edgar was on the verge of being certified to produce kosher wine from the grandparental grapes, and that the game was amazing.

“Game?” Patty said.

“Deers,” Galina said. “Unbelievable numbers of deers. Edgar, how many did you shoot last fall?”

“Fourteen,” Edgar said.

“Fourteen on our property! And they keep coming and coming, it’s stupendous.”

“See, the thing is, though,” Patty said, trying to remember whether eating deer was even kosher, “it’s not really your property. It’s kind of Joyce’s now. And I’m just wondering, since Edgar’s so smart about business, whether it might make more sense for him to go back to work, and get a real income going, so that Joyce can make her own decision about this place.”

Galina was shaking her head adamantly. “There’s the insurances. The insurances want to take anything he makes, up to I don’t know how many hundred thousands.”

“Yes, well, but if Joyce could sell this place, you guys could pay off the insurances, I mean the insurance companies, and then you could get a fresh start.”