She said, “We could just stay here and not celebrate it or something. Or we could have a bunch of people over, like we did on Thanksgiving.”
“No,” Charles said, “let’s go.”
“I know one thing,” she said. “Your father wouldn’t want us moping around on his favorite holiday.”
“I’m not moping,” Charles said. “Good. Dad wouldn’t like it.”
It had been four months, and she had weathered her grief, had shown him how strong she was, yet sometimes such a bewildered look came into her eyes. He saw in it something of his own bewilderment: his father had been young and vigorous, his heart had been judged to be strong—and now life seemed so frail and precarious.
Driving south, Charles looked over at his mother and wondered how he dismay, as if one had shown very bad manners calling up so much old-hat, so much ancient history.
“I’m not doing anything out of duty,” Charles said.
“Who said anything about duty?”
“I just wanted you to know.”
“What an odd thing to say.”
“Well, you said that about it being uncalled-for.”
“I just meant it’s not necessary, Charles. Besides, don’t you think it’s time for you to get on with the business of your own life?”
“I don’t see how traveling together is stopping me,” he said.
“All right, but I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“Okay, then.”
“Aren’t you going a little fast?”
He slowed down.
A few moments later, she said, “You’re driving. I guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“I was going too fast,” he said. “I’m kind of jumpy, too.”
They lapsed into silence. It had begun to rain a little, and Charles turned the windshield wipers on. Other cars, coming by them, threw a muddy spray up from the road.
“Of all things,” his mother said, “I really am nervous all of a sudden.”
Aunt Lois’s house was a little three-bedroom rambler in a row of three-bedroom ramblers just off the interstate. At the end of her block was an overpass sixty feet high, which at the same time each clear winter afternoon blotted out the sun; a wide band of shade stretched across the lawn and the house, and the sidewalk often stayed frozen longer than the rest of the street. Aunt Lois kept a five-pound bag of rock salt in a child’s wagon on her small front porch, and in the evenings she would stand there and throw handfuls of it on the walk. Charles’s father would tease her about it, as he teased her about everything: her chain-smoking, her love of country music—which she denied vehemently—her fear of growing fat, and her various disasters with men, about which she was apt to hold forth at great length and with very sharp humor, with herself as the butt of the jokes, the bumbling central character.
She stood in the light of her doorway, arms folded tight, and called to them to be careful of ice patches on the walk. There was so much rock salt it crackled under their feet, and Charles thought of the gravel walk they had all traversed following his father’s body in the funeral procession, the last time he had seen Aunt Lois. He shivered as he looked at her there now, outlined in the light.
“I swear,” she was saying, “I can’t believe you actually decided to come.”
“Whoops,” Charles’s mother said, losing her balance slightly. She leaned on his arm as they came up onto the porch. Aunt Lois stood back from the door. Charles couldn’t shake the feeling of the long funeral walk, that procession in his mind. He held tight to his mother’s elbow as they stepped up through Aunt Lois’s door. Her living room was warm, and smelled of cake. There was a fire in the fireplace. The lounge chair his father always sat in was on the other side of the room. Aunt Lois had moved it. Charles saw that the imprint of its legs was still in the nap of the carpet. Aunt Lois was looking at him.
“Well,” she said, smiling and looking away. She had put pinecones and sprigs of pine along the mantel. On the sofa the Sunday papers lay scattered. “I was beginning to worry,” she said, closing the door. “It’s been such a nasty day for driving.” She took their coats and hung them in the closet by the front door. She was busying herself, bustling around the room. “Sometimes I think I’d rather drive in snow than rain like this.” Finally she looked at Charles. “Don’t I get a hug?”
He put his arms around her, felt the thinness of her shoulders. One of the things his father used to say to her was that she couldn’t get fat if it was required, and the word required had had some other significance for them both, for all the adults. Charles had never fully understood it; it had something to do with when they were all in school. He said “Aunt Lois, you couldn’t get fat if it was required.”
“Don’t,” she said, waving a hand in front of her face and blinking. “Lord, boy, you even sound like him.”
He said, “We had a smooth trip.” There wasn’t anything else he could think of. She had moved out of his arms and was embracing his mother. The two women stood there holding tight, and his mother sniffled.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” Aunt Lois said. “I feel like you’ve come home.”
Charles’s mother said, “What smells so good?” and wiped her eyes with the gloved backs of her hands.
“I made spice cake. Or I tried spice cake. I burned it, of course.”
“It smells good,” Charles said.
“It does,” said his mother.
Aunt Lois said, “I hope you like it very brown.” And then they were at a loss for something else to say. Charles looked at the empty lounge chair, and Aunt Lois turned and busied herself with the clutter of newspapers on the sofa. “I’ll just get this out of the way,” she said.
“I’ve got to get the suitcases out of the trunk,” Charles said.
They hadn’t heard him. Aunt Lois was stacking the newspapers, and his mother strolled about the room like a daydreaming tourist in a museum. He let himself out and walked to the car, feeling the cold, and the aches and stiffnesses of having driven all day. It was misting now, and a wind was blowing. Cars and trucks rumbled by on the overpass, their headlights fanning out into the fog. He stood and watched them go by, and quite suddenly he did not want to be here. In the house, in the warm light of the window, his mother and Aunt Lois moved, already arranging things, already settling themselves for what would be the pattern of the next few days; and Charles, fumbling with the car keys in the dark, feeling the mist on the back of his neck, had the disquieting sense that he had come to the wrong place. The other houses, shrouded in darkness, with only one winking blue light in the window of the farthest one, seemed alien and unfriendly somehow. “Aw, Dad,” he said under his breath.
As he got the trunk open, Aunt Lois came out and made her way to him, moving very slowly, her arms out for balance. She had put on an outlandish pair of floppy yellow boots, and her flannel bathrobe collar jutted above the collar of her raincoat. “Marie seems none the worse for wear,” she said to him. “How are you two getting along?”
“We had a smooth trip,” Charles said.
“I didn’t mean the trip.”
“We’re okay, Aunt Lois.”
“She says you want to go to Europe with her.”
“It didn’t take her long,” Charles said, “did it. I just suggested it in the car on the way here. It was just an idea.”
“Let me take one of those bags, honey. I don’t want her to think I came out here just to jabber with you, although that’s exactly why I did come out.”
Charles handed her his own small suitcase.
“You like my boots?” she said. “I figured I could attract a handsome fireman with them.” She modeled them for him, turning.
“They’re a little big for you, Aunt Lois.”
“You’re no fun.”
He was struggling with his mother’s suitcases.
“I guess you noticed that I moved the chair. You looked a little surprised. But when I got back here after the funeral I walked in there and—well, ther
e it was, right where he always was whenever you all visited. I used to tease him about sleeping in it all day—you remember. We all used to tease him about it. Well, I didn’t want you to walk in and see it that way—”
Charles closed the trunk of the car and hefted the suitcases, facing her.
“You want to go home, don’t you,” she said.
It seemed to him that she had always had a way of reading him. “I want everything to be back the way it was,” he said. “I know,” Aunt Lois said.
He followed her back to the house. On the porch she turned and gave him a sad look and then forced a smile. “You’re an intelligent young man, and a very good one, too. So serious and sweet—a very dear, sweet boy.”
He might have mumbled a thank-you, he didn’t really know. He was embarrassed and confused and sick at heart; he had thought he wanted this visit. Aunt Lois kissed him on the cheek, then stood back and sighed. “I’m going to need your help about something. Boy, am I ever.”
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“It’s nothing. It’s just a situation.” She sighed again. She wasn’t looking at him now. “I don’t know why, but I find it—well, reassuring, somehow, that we—we—leave such a gaping hole in everything when we go.”
He just stood there, weighted down with the bags.
“Well,” she said, and opened the door for him.
Charles’s mother said she wanted to sit up and talk, but she kept nodding off. Finally she was asleep. When Aunt Lois began gently to wake her, to walk her in to her bed, Charles excused himself and made his way to his own bed. A few moments later he heard Aunt Lois in the kitchen. As had always been her custom, she would drink one last cup of coffee before retiring. He lay awake, hearing the soft tink of her cup against the saucer, and at last he began to drift. But in a little while he was fully awake again. Aunt Lois was moving through the house turning the lights off, and soon she too was down for the night. Charles stared through the shadows of the doorway to what he knew was the entrance to the living room, and listened to the house settle into itself. Outside, there were the hum and whoosh of traffic on the overpass, and the occasional sighing rush of rain at the window, like surf. Yet he knew he wouldn’t sleep. He was thinking of summer nights in a cottage on Cape Cod, when his family was happy, and he lay with the sun burning in his skin and listened to the adults talking and laughing out on the screened porch, the sound of the bay rushing like this rain at this window. He couldn’t sleep. Turning in the bed, he cupped his hands over his face.
A year ago, two years—at some time and in some way that was beyond him—his parents had grown quiet with each other, a change had started, and he could remember waking up one morning near the end of his last school year with a deep sense that something somewhere would go so wrong, was already so wrong that there would be no coming back from it. There was a change in the chemistry of the household that sapped his will, that took the breath out of him and left him in an exhaustion so profound that even the small energy necessary for speech seemed unavailable to him. This past summer, the first summer out of high school, he had done nothing with himself; he had found nothing he wanted to do, nothing he could feel anything at all about. He looked for a job because his parents insisted that he do so; it was an ordeal of walking, of managing to talk, to fill out applications, and in the end he found nothing. The summer wore on and his father grew angry and sullen with him. Charles was a disappointment and knew it; he was overweight, and seemed lazy, and he couldn’t find a way to explain himself. His mother thought there might be something physically wrong, and so then there were doctors, and medical examinations to endure. What he wanted was to stay in the house and have his parents be the people that they once were—happy, fortunate people with interest in each other and warmth and humor between them. And then one day in September his father keeled over on the sidewalk outside a restaurant in New York, and Charles had begun to be this person he now was, someone hurting in this irremediable way, lying awake in his aunt’s house in the middle of a cold December night, wishing with all his heart it were some other time, some other place.
In the morning, after breakfast, Aunt Lois began to talk about how good it would be to have people at her table for dinner on Christmas Eve. She had opened the draperies wide, to watch the snow fall outside. The snow had started before sunrise, but nothing had accumulated yet; it was melting as it hit the ground. Aunt Lois talked about how Christmasy it felt, and about getting a tree to put up, about making a big turkey dinner. “I don’t think anybody should be alone on Christmas,” she said. “Do you, Marie?”
“Not unless they want to,” Marie said.
“Right, and who wants to be alone on Christmas?”
“Lois, I suppose you’re going to come to the point soon.”
“Well,” Aunt Lois said, “I guess I am driving at something. I’ve invited someone over to dinner on Christmas Eve.”
“Who.”
“It’s someone you know.”
“Lois, please.”
“I ran into him on jury duty last June,” Aunt Lois said. “Can you imagine? After all these years—and we’ve become very good friends again. I mean I’d court him if I thought I had a chance.”
“Lois, who are we talking about?”
“Well,” Aunt Lois said, “It’s Bill Downs.”
Marie stood. “You’re not serious.”
“It has nothing to do with anything,” Lois said. “To tell you the truth, I invited them before I knew you were coming.”
“Them?”
“He has a cousin visiting. I told him they could both come.”
“Who’s Bill Downs?” Charles asked.
“He’s nobody,” said his mother.
“He’s somebody from a long time ago,” Aunt Lois said. They had spoken almost in unison. Aunt Lois went on: “His cousin just lost his wife. Well—last year. Bill didn’t want him to be alone. He says he’s a very interesting man—”
“Lois, I don’t care if he’s the King of England.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Aunt Lois said. “Don’t make it into something it isn’t. Look at us, anyway—look how depleted we are. I want people here. I don’t want it just the three of us on Christmas. You have Charles; I’m the last one in this family, Marie. And this—this isn’t just your grief. Lawrence was my brother. I didn’t want to be alone—do you want me to spell it out for you?”
Marie now seemed too confused to speak. She only glanced at Charles, then turned and left the room. Her door closed quietly. Aunt Lois sat back against the cushions of the sofa and shut her eyes for a moment.
“Who’s Bill Downs?” Charles said.
When she opened her eyes it was as if she had just noticed him there. “The whole thing is just silly. We were all kids together. It was a million years ago.”
Charles said nothing. In the fireplace a single charred log hissed. Aunt Lois sat forward and took a cigarette from her pack and lighted it. “I wonder what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you have a steady girl, Charles?”
He nodded. The truth was that he was too shy, too aware of his girth and the floridness of his complexion, too nervous and clumsy to be more than the clownish, kindly friend he was to the girls he knew.
“Do you think you’ll go on and marry her?”
“Who?” he said.
“Your girl.”
“Oh,” he said, “probably not.”
“Some people do, of course. And some don’t. Some people go on and meet other people. Do you see? When I met your mother, your father was away at college.”
“I think I had this figured out already, Aunt Lois.”
“Well—then that’s who Bill Downs is.” She got to her feet, with some effort, then stood gazing down at him. “This just isn’t the way it looks, though. And everybody will just have to believe me about it.”
“I believe you,” Charles said.
“She doesn’t,”
said Aunt Lois, “and now she’s probably going to start lobbying to go home.”
Charles shook his head.
“I hope you won’t let her talk you into it.”
“Nobody’s going anywhere,” Marie said, coming into the room. She sat down on the sofa and opened the morning paper, and when she spoke now it was as if she were not even attentive to her own words. “Though it would serve you right if everybody deserted you out of embarrassment.”
“You might think about me a little, Marie. You might think how I feel in all this.”
Marie put the newspaper down on her lap and looked at her. “I am thinking of you. If I wasn’t thinking of you I’d be in the car this minute, heading north, whether Charles would come or not.”
“Well, fine,” Aunt Lois said, and stormed out of the room.
A little later, Charles and Marie went into the city. They parked the car in a garage on H Street and walked over to Lafayette Square. It was still snowing, but the ground was too warm; it wouldn’t stick. Charles said, “Might as well be raining,” and realized that neither of them had spoken since they had pulled away from Aunt Lois’s house.
“Charles,” his mother said, and then seemed to stop herself. “Never mind.”
“What?” he said.
“Nothing. It’s easy to forget that you’re only eighteen. I forget sometimes, that’s all.”
Charles sensed that this wasn’t what she had started to say, but kept silent. They crossed the square and entered a sandwich shop on Seventeenth Street, to warm themselves with a cup of coffee. They sat at a table by the window and looked out at the street, the people walking by—shoppers mostly, burdened with packages.
“Where’s the Lafayette Hotel from here?” Charles asked.
“Oh, honey, they tore that down a long time ago.”
“Where was it?”
“You can’t see it from here.” She took a handkerchief out of her purse and touched the corners of her eyes with it. “The cold makes my eyes sting. How about you?”
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 23