The Corrections

A holly wreath was on the door. The front walk was edged with snow and evenly spaced broom marks. The midwestern street struck the traveler as a wonderland of wealth and oak trees and conspicuously useless space. The traveler didn’t see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn’t simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages. The old street with its oak smoke and snowy flat-topped hedges and icicled eaves seemed precarious. It seemed mirage-like. It seemed like an exceptionally vivid memory of something beloved and dead.

“Well!” Alfred said, his face blazing with joy, as he took Chip’s hand in both of his. “Look who’s here!”

Enid tried to elbow her way into the picture, speaking Chip’s name, but Alfred wouldn’t let go of his hand. He said it twice more: “Look who’s here! Look who’s here!”

“Al, let him come in and close the door,” Enid said.

Chip was balking at the doorway. The world outside was black and white and gray and swept by fresh, clear air; the enchanted interior was dense with objects and smells and colors, humidity, large personalities. He was afraid to enter.

“Come in, come in,” Enid squeaked, “and shut the door.”

To protect himself from spells, he privately spoke an incantation: I’m staying for three days and then I’m going back to New York, I’m finding a job, I’m putting aside five hundred dollars a month, minimum, until I’m out of debt, and I’m working every night on the script.

Invoking this charm, which was all he had now, the paltry sum of his identity, he stepped through the doorway.

“My word, you’re scratchy and smelly,” Enid said, kissing him. “Now, where’s your suitcase?”

“It’s by the side of a gravel road in western Lithuania.”

“I’m just happy you’re home safely.”

Nowhere in the nation of Lithuania was there a room like the Lambert living room. Only in this hemisphere could carpeting so sumptuously woolen and furniture so big and so well made and so opulently upholstered be found in a room of such plain design and ordinary situation. The light in the wood-framed windows, though gray, had a prairie optimism; there wasn’t a sea within six hundred miles to trouble the atmosphere. And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.

Chip apprehended it all in a heartbeat. The continent, his homeland. Scattered around the living room were nests of opened presents and little leavings of spent ribbon, wrapping-paper fragments, labels. At the foot of the fireside chair that Alfred always claimed for himself, Denise was kneeling by the largest nest of presents.

“Denise, look who’s here,” Enid said.

As if out of obligation, with downcast eyes, Denise rose and crossed the room. But when she’d put her arms around Chip and he’d squeezed her in return (her height, as always, surprised him), she wouldn’t let go. She clung to him—kissed his neck, fastened her eyes on him, and thanked him.

Gary came over and embraced Chip awkwardly, his face averted. “Didn’t think you were going to make it,” he said.

“Neither did I,” Chip said.

“Well!” Alfred said again, gazing at him in wonder.

“Gary has to leave at eleven,” Enid said, “but we can all have breakfast together. You get cleaned up, and Denise and I will start breakfast. Oh, this is just what I wanted,” she said, hurrying to the kitchen. “This is the best Christmas present I’ve ever had!”

Gary turned to Chip with his I’m-a-jerk face. “There you go,” he said. “Best Christmas present she’s ever had.”

“I think she means having all five of us together,” Denise said.

“Well, she’d better enjoy it in a hurry,” Gary said, “because she owes me a discussion and I’m expecting payment.”

Chip, detached from his own body, trailed after it and wondered what it was going to do. He removed an aluminum stool from the downstairs bathroom shower. The blast of water was strong and hot. His impressions were fresh in a way that he would either remember all his life or instantly forget. A brain could absorb only so many impressions before it lost the ability to decode them, to put them in coherent shape and order. His nearly sleepless night on a patch of airport carpeting, for example, was still very much with him and begging to be processed. And now here was a hot shower on Christmas morning. Here were the familiar tan tiles of the stall. The tiles, like every other physical constituent of the house, were suffused with the fact of their ownership by Enid and Alfred, saturated with an aura of belonging to this family. The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building.