The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  But at night her husband is diere, and while I listen to him talk about the disintegration of the schools (he teaches high school science, and I did too, until I was fired) or listen to him talk about the Yankees, she drafts letters to her two sons, both away at college—the same college, the same dormitory, though one son is two years older than the other and will graduate sooner. If we talk at all, really, it’s always about these two—one is letting his grades go to hell playing intramural basketball, the other is in love with a girl who has anorexia and has been in and out of the hospital.

  “She’s been down to eighty pounds,” my sister says. “She doesn’t look much heavier than that now. She could be somebody out of those pictures of the death camps. And he says it’s because she’s depressed. She doesn’t like herself. For God’s sake.”

  “I think that’s what the doctors are saying about it, though,” I say.

  “It’s ridiculous,” my sister says. “We’re spending all this money on their education and you’d think somebody would teach them to be a little more careful about who they get involved with.”

  They’re her sons. Her husband is childless, much older than she is; the boys were already out of high school when she met him. He was at George Washington on a summer grant, and she worked as a secretary in the Education Department. They were both recently divorced, and, as my sister put it once, they fell into each other’s arms and saved each other. His name is Roger. He’s a very kind, quiet, slow-moving man, whose face seems perpetually pinched in thought, as if he’s on the verge of recalling something very important. It’s always as if he’s about to burst into passionate speech. Yet when he actually does speak his voice is high-pitched and timid, and I find myself feeling a little sorry for him.

  In the mornings, as he rushes from the house to catch his bus to the high school, my sister hurries along beside him. They talk. She gesticulates and explains; he nods and appears to try to calm her. From time to time one of them glances back at the house, at the window of this room. My sister will explain these little episodes by talking of Roger’s forgetfulness. “He forgot his wallet again,” she says, “Who does that remind you of?”

  “Me?” I say.

  “No, you never forgot anything in your life.”

  “Well, who,” I say. “You?”

  “Eddie,” she says. “Don’t you remember how bad Eddie always was?”

  Eddie was her first husband, and I don’t know why she brings him up to me in this way because I never really knew the man. I left home shortly after she met him. Uncle Raymond had died, and Mother was little more than an invalid. There was ill feeling over my decision to leave, though I did have a job to go to. It wasn’t as though I was hiring onto a ship or something, to wander the high seas. It was a very good job which I grew to like very much. But I remember my sister thought I was merely running away and for a long time after I went to teach in New York, I didn’t hear from her. In fact, she wrote that first time only to inform me of Mother’s death. I had expected the news for some time, because Mother’s letters had stopped scolding me about my failure to write my sister, and began to repeat, over and over, her regret about having spoken meanly to my father on the last day he was alive. It was apparently something she’d been carrying around all those years. They had been having some trouble over money, and she called him a weakling. It was the last thing she ever said to him. My wife, who lives in Florida now with someone named Kenny, left me a note which read, simply, You deserve this. She knew Kenny from her work; they were telephone friends. Kenny was the Florida representative for Satellite Analysis Systems Corporation, and they used to talk on the phone. When our trouble began, she started confiding in Kenny. Now they live together in a condominium on the Gulf. Kenny used to take drugs, she says, but that’s all over now. Lately, I hear from her mostly through her lawyer, whose name is Judith. We’re on a first-name basis because Judith used to be our lawyer. Everything has been fairly cordial, but they did take the house and most of the things in it; they put it all on auction, and since I no longer had my job, and there wasn’t much anyone would say to me where we lived, I came here, and was taken in.

  That first night I explained to my sister what had happened, and why I was alone. We were in her car, on the way to Point Royal from the train station. “My principal asked me to find out what I could about the supposed drinking problem of one of the school’s assistant principals,” I said, “Nothing came of it except that he got wind of it and started working very hard to ruin me with the school board. Then my principal left, and this man replaced him. Life got hard. And I started being the one who was drinking. Things went from bad to worse. Janice was already talking about leaving me. I went into the city alone one night, had a few whiskeys, and you know the rest.”

  “You shouldn’t have married her,” my sister said.

  “We were married for sixteen years,” I said.

  She was driving, holding the wheel with both hands. “It’s so stupid. It’s—it’s humiliating. I don’t want you to tell anyone here anything about it.”

  “No,” I said, “of course. No.”

  “My God,” she said, “What will you do now?”

  “I thought of suicide before I called you. Seems I hadn’t the courage.”

  “Suicide. What’s happened to you? How could you wind up like this—how could you let it happen?”

  “I don’t have any explanation,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “I wish you hadn’t come here with it all.” We were pulling into her driveway. Roger stood out in the porch light, his hair blowing in the chilly night breeze. He looked irritable and tired, but he took the trouble to come down the walk and shake my hand.

  “I had no place to go,” I said.

  “As long as a man has a family, he has a place to go,” he said, and my sister gave him a look.

  Still, she allows me to stay, on the condition that I see a counselor at the local clinic. Actually, this is a compromise: she had originally wanted me to see a priest, which was something I just couldn’t bring myself to do. There is also the stipulation that I find work as quickly as possible; but the counselor has suggested a couple of weeks’ rest. “Everything fell apart,” I tell him. “My wife lives with someone named Kenny,” I tell him. “I want to tell children about gravity and what happens when it thunders, but I have a criminal record. I took apart a prostitute’s poor, shabby room, and broke her arm, and got arrested. I assaulted a police officer. I don’t even know how it happened. I’m born Catholic and God is like a hurricane on the West Coast. I never saw my father.” He listens and I grow weary of my own voice, my litany. He’s like a priest, finally, and I tell him so.

  “Of course,” he says.

  “Just tell me I’m forgiven,” I say.

  “You’re forgiven,” he says.

  “I don’t feel forgiven,” I say.

  “It takes steady effort for a while,” he says. He folds his hands and begins to talk about making friends with one’s emotions, and I fold my own hands, as if listening. But my mind wanders. I remember a sign the nuns put on the wall in the classroom where I spent my sixth-grade year: “MY STRENGTH IS AS THE STRENGTH OF TEN BECAUSE MY HEART IS PURE.” And I think of the photograph, the one picture of my father, the snapshot about which my sister claims to have no memory of fascination. She’s the only person in the picture who isn’t dead now. My mother cradles her, smiling into the sun; behind my mother, a little to the side, my father is bending over with his hands on his knees, looking out at us as if waiting for a ball to be thrown, or a signal to be called, some action to begin. At his shoulder, as though he’s supporting them, are a beach cottage and the sea.

  I ask my sister, “What do you imagine ever happened to it?”

  “You’re talking about that goddamn picture again,” she says. “What could possibly be so important about a picture of somebody you never knew?”

  “You remember,” I say. “I used to carry it around—Uncle Raymond took it from m
e. He took it from me and gave it to Mother.”

  “You’ve just come here to give up,” she says. “Is that it?”

  “Do you recall,” I say, “when Uncle Raymond took it from me and gave it to Mother and said, ‘That’s the story of the man’s life’?”

  “I remember no such thing.”

  “Do you ever think about Uncle Raymond?”

  “Of course. He was like a father to us.”

  “No,” I say, “Not to me. Why did he and Mother have so little to say about Father?”

  “I’ve never bothered myself with that.”

  “Uncle Raymond was no father to me,” I say.

  “Stop this,” she says. “Get out and find yourself something to do. You can’t just stay here indefinitely—we can’t be expected to support you much longer if you won’t do anything to help yourself.”

  “I’m trying to,” I say.

  “And how can you say that about Uncle Raymond? He was a quiet man, he didn’t know how to show affection maybe—but he was there; he supported us, fed us.”

  “I always felt starved,” I say.

  But she doesn’t want to talk anymore, complains of not having enough time to herself with me in the house. I come to this room, and sit down to write about Uncle Raymond, who was indeed a quiet man. I remember his white socks, his seafood, his Lucky Tiger hair oil, his Ram’s Head Ale, and his camera. I have an image of him sitting in front of a television set—one of the first models General Electric made—watching Milton Berle and listening to H. V. Kaltenborn on the radio: he didn’t quite believe in television then, and was afraid he’d miss something. I remember the confusion of noises in the rooms—applause, music, voices, laughter. Uncle Raymond had been in the war in the Pacific, was one of fifteen survivors of a brigade that landed on Tarawa. He was suspicious of the Jews, hated Truman. Listening to the news, he would raise his voice now and again. “That bastard Truman,” he would say, or “That goddamn haberdasher.” He was the one who took the photograph, using a black box camera his father had given him on his twenty-first birthday. Kodak. All those years he’d kept that camera; it sat like a truncated telephone in the middle of his bureau drawer, the lens broken because he’d dropped it once while trying to change the film. Once I went into his room—it was some time after he’d taken the photograph from me and, holding it up to the light, said to my mother, “You know, that’s the story of the man’s life.” I crept to the bureau while he slept, and lifted the camera to look through the lens. A jagged line separated the magnified from the unmagnified world. Looking at the crucifix on the wall above his bed, I snapped the shutter. Uncle Raymond woke, groaning, sat up suddenly, looking at me and blinking. I put the camera down.

  “Get out of here,” he said.

  “Uncle Raymond,” I said, “I dreamed last night that I was a mailman—I was delivering mail.”

  “What the hell?” He reached for his cigarettes on the night table.

  I kept talking because I was in his room and was a little afraid, but also because in fact I had been troubled by a nightmare that I was delivering mail, and that everywhere I went the houses were all empty, doors were ajar in the wind, and glass was broken out of windows. I told him only about finding the houses empty.

  “Yeah?” he said, “So?”

  “It scared me.”

  “It was a nightmare, then. Nightmares are scary.” He lighted a cigarette. He never smoked except in this room, because Mother couldn’t stand the smell of tobacco.

  “Uncle Raymond, can I have the picture back?” I said.

  “What picture? What time is it? What’re you doing here anyway?”

  “I just want to know what you did with the picture.”

  “Jesus,” my uncle said. “Will you get out of here?”

  “What happened to my father?” I said.

  He stared at me. I suppose he was trying to wake up. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do,” he said. “You already know about him—he was just like a lot of people. I told you all this before. He was a guy. He liked sports. He played a lot of sports and he was pretty good at them. There isn’t anything else.”

  I stood there with my hands at my sides, waiting.

  “All right,” he said, “what else do you want?”

  “My father wasn’t in the war,” I said.

  “No. He had flat feet. He got to stay home. But he was unlucky—all right? A girder fell in the shipyard where he worked and he was standing under it. And he got killed. He never knew what hit him and he probably died happy. He never worried about anything in his life except the next game of whatever it was he happened to be playing, and he probably died happy. Now, what more can I tell you?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Roger hints about my leaving. He lies back in his easy chair in his clean white shirt, his hands tenderly caressing the loose flesh below his chin. Papers and small pieces of note cards jut from his pockets. My sister is in my room, dusting and cleaning, as if I had already gone.

  “You can’t just sit still like this,” Roger says, “You’re a grown man. A lot of men have to start over at your age.”

  “I don’t know where to go,” I say. “It’s ridiculous, but I want to look at my father again. I feel as though I took nothing at all with me out of my childhood, but surely there’s something in all those boxes up in your attic.”

  “There’s nothing of interest to you in my attic,” he says.

  “There’s a photograph,” I say.

  “I know all that,” he says. “I’ve heard it all over and over again from her.” He sits forward in the chair. “I’ve done my best to be kind, here, but you have to be out by the end of the week. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it’s got to be.”

  “Of course,” I say, “I understand.”

  I think of my father. I lie awake in what may be my last night here, imagining his speed and deftness and bad luck. If I sleep, I may dream he’s sitting on a tattered mattress in an upstairs room—a hotel in Point Royal in 1938— drunk, his money spent, his clothes strewn everywhere, while before him, in the meager light of a single lamp, a woman dresses slowly. Say his wife is leaving him. Say he’s filled with fear and anger and say the woman is someone he’s never met before in his life.

  She laughs, softly. “You married?”

  My father, in this dream, lies, “No.” He thinks of his own father, perhaps, or of his wife. He covers himself, pulls at a piece of his clothing on the floor by the bed. “I feel sick,” he says.

  “You didn’t get nothing done,” she says. “Nothing to be sick about.”

  And say that then the police come in, not charging loudly as one might suppose, but casually, as if browsing in a store: they know the people they will arrest, except for my father, who, in his panic, picks up the lamp by the bed and begins to flail and beat at the policemen and at the woman. Say he breaks the poor woman’s arm with the lamp; say he’s dragged fighting from the room and the building, and that he knows, even while it’s all happening to him, that this is the one truest mistake of his life and that he’ll never outlive it.

  Lying awake, thinking I may dream this, I hear the wail of a siren, and the soft protesting of the floor beyond the room, where my sister and her husband pace and whisper. I would like to find the photograph. It’s a small thing, I know; it changes nothing, but I want to look at my father’s face and see if I can find in it some trace of a thing he regrets. I would like to know what that thing is.

  Oh, and I would like to start over, all over again, from the very beginning, as if I were new and clean and worthy, and the envy of people like me.

  POLICE DREAMS

  For Thomas Philion

  About a month before Jean left him, Casey dreamed he was sitting in the old Maverick with her and the two boys, Rodney and Michael. The boys were in back, and they were being loud, and yet Casey felt alone with his wife; it was a friendly feeling, having her there next to him in the old car, the car they’d dated in. It seemed qui
te normal that they should all be sitting in this car which was sold two years before Michael, who is seven years old, was born. It was quite dark, quite late. The street they were on shimmered with rain. A light was blinking nearby, at an intersection, making a haze through which someone or something moved. Things shifted, and all the warm feeling was gone; Casey tried to press the gas pedal, and couldn’t, and it seemed quite logical that he couldn’t. And men were opening the doors of the car. They came in on both sides. It was clear that they were going to start killing; they were just going to go ahead and kill everyone.

  He woke from this dream, shaking, and lay there in the dark imagining noises in the house, intruders. Finally he made himself get up and go check things out, looking in all the closets downstairs, making sure all the doors and windows were secure. For a cold minute he peered out at the moon on the lawn, crouching by the living-room window. The whole thing was absurd: he had dreamed something awful and it was making him see and hear things. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of milk, drank it down, then took a couple of gulps of water. In the boys’ room, he made sure their blankets were over them; he kissed each of them on the cheek, and placed his hand for a moment (big and warm, he liked to think) across each boy’s shoulder blades. Then he went back into the bedroom and lay down and looked at the clock radio beyond the curving shadow of Jean’s shoulder. It was five forty-five A.M., and here he was, the father of two boys, a daddy, and he wished his own father were in the house. He closed his eyes, but knew he wouldn’t sleep. What he wanted to do was reach over and kiss Jean out of sleep, but she had gone to bed with a bad anxiety attack, and she always woke up depressed afterward. There was something she had to work out; she needed his understanding. So he lay there and watched the light come, trying to understand everything, and still feeling in his nerves the nightmare he’d had. After a while, Jean stirred, reached over and turned the clock radio off before the music came on. She sat up, looked at the room as if to decide about whose it was, then got out of the bed. “Casey,” she said.