“That I am a Republican and don’t believe in big government—and you are right—but I will pay my taxes.” Recalling this, he never understood the fury he had felt.
Abel now took a deep, unquiet breath and sat up straight; he discreetly checked his pulse and found it to be high.
Onstage, Scrooge was peering through the filthy nighttime window. Then he was on his bed listening to the ding-dongs of the bell, then he was off his bed, agitated, saying, “It can’t be!” Abel recalled—at that moment—how his wife had handed him the newspaper at breakfast a few days earlier, tapping with her finger one column. Linck McKenzie, the man who played Scrooge, might be a favorite with the townspeople, he might be a favorite with the students he taught in the MFA program at Littleton College, but he was no favorite of the critic who wrote that he was a lucky man, this Mr. Linck McKenzie, being the only person in the theater who did not have to watch his own performance.
Elaine and Abel had agreed: The review was gratuitously mean. And then Abel had forgotten it. But now the words affected him. Now it seemed that Scrooge really was ridiculous, that the entire thing was arguably ridiculous. It seemed to Abel that everyone was loudly reciting a line, and this caused him discomfort, as though he’d not be able to leave the theater without thinking that everyone he met was reciting a line. Surely going to the theater should not have that effect on a person. He glanced down at sweet Sophia, and she gave him the compressed, fleeting smile of a polite young woman. He squeezed her knee and she became a little girl again, ducking her head, then holding his hand, with the plastic pony gripped in her other.
The Ghost of Christmas Past was saying, “A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.” And Scrooge began to cry. The sound was phony, dismissible. Abel closed his eyes. Sophia’s hand slipped from his; he folded his hands on his lap, and soon he was falling asleep. He knew this because of the incongruity of his thoughts, and felt gratitude that he could give himself over to the pleasant exhaustion rolling up against his shoulders; he remembered, and it was like a yellow light shining in the dusk behind his closed eyes, how he had seen Lucy Barton last year when she came to Chicago on her book tour, Lucy Barton, the daughter of his mother’s cousin, oh, that poor girl, and yet there she was, an older woman, and he had stepped into the bookstore and waited in line to have his book signed, and she had said, Abel, and risen, and tears had come into her eyes—all this made him feel happy as he felt himself falling into sleep, but then he was trying to find his mother, riding in an elevator that would not stop when the buttons were pushed, then he was in a narrow hallway, searching for her, going one way then another, sensing her in the darkness—and she was gone; even deep inside the dream he recognized the ancient, unquenchable longing that was not quite panic— He woke as gasps came from the audience.
The lights had gone out. The stage was in darkness. The actors had stopped speaking. Only the EXIT signs shone above the doors. And the rows of lights like bright buttons on the floor of the aisle. Abel could feel fear rising around him like dark water. Sophia began to cry, and other children were crying too. “Mommy?” Abel scooped up the tiny Sophia and tucked her onto his lap. “Ssh,” he said, spreading his hand across the back of her warm head. “It’s nothing, it will be fine.” Still, the child cried. Zoe’s voice said, “Honey, I’m right here.”
How long it stayed dark Abel could not have said, probably no more than a few minutes, but what he was most aware of during this strange time was the number of families that began to argue strenuously, his own included. Elaine said, “Abel, get us out of here. Watch the children.” Already in the darkness people were trying to scramble to the aisle, some flipping on cellphones for the light, so that wrists and cuffs were illuminated in what seemed to be disembodied flickers of an ectoplasmic presence. Zoe said, “Mom, stop. This is how people get trampled to death. Dad, hold Sophia, I’ve got Jake.”
“I want us out of here, Abel,” his wife said. “And if you—”
After many years of marriage things get said, scenes occur, and there is a cumulative effect as well. All this sped through Abel’s heart, that the tenderness between husband and wife had long been attenuating and that he might have to live the rest of his life without it. A sound came from him.
“Dad? Are you okay?” The light of Zoe’s cellphone was aimed toward him.
“I’m fine, honey,” he said. “We’ll wait. Just as you say.”