The Corrections

“Installing a bar in the shower is not a ‘little job,’ ” he replied. “It would have made sense a year ago, but it doesn’t now. Dad can use the bathtub for another few days until we deal with this house.”

“It’s still four weeks before we fly to Philadelphia,” Enid said. “I want him to get in the habit of using the shower. I want you to buy a stool and put a bar in there tomorrow, so it’s done.”

Gary sighed. “Are you thinking you and Dad can actually stay in this house?”

“If Corecktall helps him—”

“Mother, he’s being evaluated for dementia. Do you honestly believe—”

“For non-drug-related dementia.”

“Look, I don’t want to puncture your bubble—”

“Denise has it all set up. We have to try it.”

“So, and then what?” Gary said. “He’s miraculously cured, and the two of you live here happily ever after?”

The light in the windows had died entirely. Enid didn’t understand why her sweet, responsible oldest child, with whom she’d felt such a bond from his infancy onward, became so angry, now, when she came to him in need. She unwrapped a Styrofoam ball that he’d decorated with fabric and sequins when he was nine or ten. “Do you remember this?”

Gary took the ball. “We made these in Mrs. Ostriker’s class.”

“You gave it to me.”

“Did I?”

“You said you’d do anything I asked tomorrow,” Enid said. “This is what I’m asking.”

“All right! All right!” Gary threw his hands in the air. “I’ll buy the stool! I’ll install the bar!”

After dinner he took the Olds from the garage, and the three of them went to Christmasland.

From the back seat Enid could see the undersides of clouds catching urban light; the patches of clear sky were darker and riddled with stars. Gary piloted the car down narrow suburban roads to the limestone gates of Waindell Park, where a long queue of cars, trucks, and minivans was waiting to enter.

“Look at all the cars,” Alfred said with no trace of his old impatience.

By charging admission to Christmasland, the county helped defray the cost of mounting this annual extravaganza. A county park ranger took the Lamberts’ ticket and told Gary to extinguish all but his parking lights. The Olds crept forward in a line of darkened vehicles that had never looked more like animals than they did now, collectively, in their humble procession through the park.

For most of the year, Waindell was a tired place of burnt grass, brown ponds, and unambitious limestone pavilions. In December, by day, it looked its very worst. Garish cables and utilitarian power lines crisscrossed the lawns. Armatures and scaffolds were exposed in their flimsiness, their provisionality, their metallic knobbiness of joint. Hundreds of trees and shrubs were draped in light strings, limbs sagging as if hammered by a freezing rain of glass and plastic.

By night the park was Christmasland. Enid drew breath sharply as the Olds crept up a hill of light and across a landscape made luminous. Just as the beasts were said to speak on Christmas Eve, so the natural order of the suburbs seemed overturned here, the ordinarily dark land alive with light, the ordinarily lively road dark with crawling traffic.

The mild gradients of Waindell’s slopes and the intimacy of its ridgelines’ relations with the sky were midwestern. So, it seemed to Enid, were the hush and patience of the drivers; so were the isolated close-knit frontier communities of oaks and maples. She’d spent the last eight Christmases exiled in the alien East, and now, at last, she felt at home. She imagined being buried in this landscape. She was happy to think of her bones resting on a hillside such as this.

There came scintillant pavilions, luminous reindeer, pendants and necklaces of gathered photons, electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces, a glade of towering glowing candy canes.

“Lot of work involved here,” Alfred commented.

“Well, I’m sorry Jonah couldn’t come after all,” Gary said, as if, until now, he had not been sorry.

The spectacle was nothing more than lights in darkness, but Enid was speechless. So often credulity was asked of you, so seldom could you summon it absolutely, but here at Waindell Park she could. Somebody had set out to delight all comers, and Enid was delighted. And tomorrow Denise and Chip came, tomorrow was The Nutcracker, and on Wednesday they would take the Christ baby from its pocket and pin the walnut cradle to the tree: she had so much to look forward to.