The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “I never remember much of Hemingway,” Tom says.

  “Maybe it wasn’t a church in Hemingway,” my father says. “Anyway, that was the night I ran into Mark Loomis.”

  “Mark Loomis,” I say. I have the same vague memory of him, around the time of David Shaw. I repeat the name.

  “Mark Loomis,” says my father. “Right. We worked together for a few years—Loomis and David Shaw and me. We were good friends. Loomis and I watched David Shaw get it but good in nineteen fifty-one. It was tremendously easy.”

  “That was a bad time, I guess,” Tom says. He’s feeling the martinis. And when he’s feeling his drinks he’s likely to be sincere enough about such a statement. Now he pours more gin into both glasses. It’s not even seven o’clock in the evening.

  James went into town for two job interviews—one teaching high school, another managing a trade magazine. Both interviews were in the afternoon, so I know he’s stopped off somewhere, is sitting in a bar watching the television and getting himself fortified for the night. I know this because James is fortifying himself every night these days.

  Tom got the interviews for him because Tom knows a lot of teachers at the college and quite a few people in the trade publications business around the area. People trust him. And James, for all his talk those years ago about how I was throwing myself away on a man like Tom, is learning to appreciate someone who can get along in the practical world. What James has never had it in him to see, what my father never saw, is the way Tom is with the children, the delight he takes in them, the patience he shows each of them, and the love. They adore him. They don’t care a bit if he never writes a book or delivers a reel of spy tape in the desert. They want somebody to be interested in their lives and to have time for them. Which is and has always been what I happen to want, too.

  The conversation about the blacklisting is going on. “You can’t be too careful, even these days,” Tom says. “The mistake is thinking it won’t happen because this is America.”

  “Quite perceptive,” my father says, drinking. “That’s the mistake a lot of them made. But I think it is a matter of not being foolhardy, too. I mean, that kind of faith is foolhardy. Look at those poor students in China—that sad naive faith that the soldiers wouldn’t kill them in cold blood.”

  “Foolhardy,” Tom says. “Right.”

  “I’m going outside,” I say.

  “But now—listen,” says my father, beginning to slur the words a little. “It’s simply true there are personal reasons for what people do. Marilyn’s mother, for instance. You know, she belonged to this—this club that got David Shaw in such trouble. She belonged to that club, too. Well, the poor woman grew up in Richmond—and her mother used to dress her up and invite the cream of polite society over for dinner. Every available young man with money and position, along with his parents. Used to send these people printed invitations, hundreds of printed invitations to get the four or five idiots who had nothing better to do than show up. And then, just as dinner was served, she’d leave Marilyn’s mother there alone with them. Marilyn’s mother ran away from that, finally. Went to New York on the train and got a job in a bank. That’s where I met her. By that time she was a charter member of the club that David Shaw belonged to. You know what I’m talking about.”

  “I’m getting drunk,” Tom says.

  “You see—personal reasons—” my father waves one hand, vaguely, as if at an audience across the room. “You saw The Brace, didn’t you? Lot of that’s straight from life, see. Personal reasons. And—and people change. People are not the same. Very unpredictable.”

  These are the words of the famous playwright.

  “I guess so,” Tom tells him.

  “So,” my father says. “James has turned up.”

  “That’s the crux of it,” says Tom.

  They’re both getting tight.

  “What was James doing in Lebanon?”

  “He said something for the government.”

  “Never worked for a government in my life.”

  I get up and walk through the dining room to the kitchen and the dinner dishes. It’s almost dark, and I can hear the children playing hide-and-seek in the yard. Something frantic in their voices makes me feel oddly as if all the energy is about to drain out of me. The world is all noise and confusion for a moment. Everything seems very precarious and dark. I turn the porch light on, and one of the kids, Ellie I think, yells for me to turn it off. I do. I stand in the light of the kitchen, gazing out at what I can see of the yard.

  James walks out of the dark and up onto the first step.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey,” I say.

  He’s holding the bad arm as if it hurts. Over the past few days, I’ve begun to realize it’s a habit, like a tic. There’s no feeling in the arm. “That’s who I think it is, isn’t it,” he says, leaning up to look beyond me. “In there.”

  “James,” I say.

  “I guess I’m not ready to face him yet.”

  “James,” I say, “what did you come here for?”

  “You remember David Shaw?” he says.

  I can’t say anything for a second. The whole thing is like one of those absurd dreams unfolding until it begins to get scary. He smiles at me and in the bad light his face is both ghostly and like our mother’s. “Sure you do,” he says.

  “What about him?” I say. “James, come in here now.”

  He steps back down into the grass. “I’ve got something important on Shaw. A diary. And the old man wants it.”

  Again I can’t say anything.

  “I’m going to go have some more fortification for this,” he says. “More than I originally thought. I’m just not ready yet. I can’t stand him unless I’m completely crocked. Is he drunk yet?”

  “James,” I say. “For God’s sake.”

  But he’s already off in the dark, a moving shadow going across the lawns like a prowler. He’s going on, and I hear my oldest, John, take a pretend potshot at him. “You got me, sport,” James says, low. Then he’s gone.

  When I turn back into the kitchen, my father’s standing at the counter with the ice bucket and the bottles. “Condensation on your coffee table,” he says. “I’m making the drinks out here.”

  I watch him.

  “I should’ve mentioned that I saw James in Italy,” he says. “Sorry. It wasn’t a very fruitful conversation. I did manage to get some information from him about something I was looking for. I guess I told him I was going back to Santa Monica. But I stayed in Rome awhile.”

  “You let us go on like that.”

  “Well,” he says. “It was months ago.”

  I feel suddenly cheated somehow, yet I can’t put my finger on it. There’s something wrong with the two of them meeting in Italy while I’m here, going on in the assumption that they’re estranged. I can’t explain it. But it drops into me like something going down a deep well, and for a minute I can’t do anything but stand there and breathe.

  “Do you want a drink?” he says.

  “No,” I tell him.

  “That was James out there, wasn’t it?”

  I nod.

  “He coming in?”

  “He went to fortify himself.”

  “A phrase he got from me.”

  I say nothing. He’s got both drinks now, and he turns slightly to look at me.

  “Loomis—that I ran into in Rome. He was in touch with James. There’s some stuff about David Shaw—”

  I interrupt him. “James told me.”

  “It’s just something Shaw gave him. And he’d left at home. James was older, remember. Shaw made it a game between the two of them, you know, like pretending to be spies.”

  “Yes,” I say.

  My father shakes his head. “Shaw was all glittery courage. But he was crazy at the end.”

  “I remember him,” I say.

  “Well.” He turns. Then he stops, looks back at me. “My whole life I never had an ounce of the kind of integri
ty he had. Him or your mother. You know, and it’s always hurt me to know it. All I do—all I ever did—is make little costume dramas—it’s all I’m good for. And I was unwilling to take even the smallest risk that I’d ever be stopped from doing it. The one thing I do well—”

  “Oh, look,” I say.

  “Right,” he says. “For a second there I forgot who I was talking to.”

  “I am not beneath you,” I tell him.

  He says nothing for a moment.

  “I have done what I wanted to do,” I say. “Exactly the same as you.”

  “I was confessing something to you,” he says.

  “Your confessions are too easy. You’re too glib about them.”

  “After all,” he says. “I deal in words.”

  “You make lies,” I say.

  “I know this,” he answers. “You’re talking about The Brace. Would it interest you to know that your mother wanted me out of the house when I left?”

  “And that’s why you portrayed her like that?”

  “Well,” he says. “I should know by now I can’t argue this with you or James, either. I can’t help the material, though. There’s almost nothing of intention in it. There’s not the remotest wish to bruise, either.”

  Tom walks in. He’s heard the tones in our voices, and he’s pitched himself into the middle of us, wanting to make harmony and friendship. He kisses the side of my face and, moving a little unsteadily to the refrigerator, opens it. “Never mind that drink,” he says to my father. “I’m just going to have a beer.”

  My father drinks Tom’s martini down and sets the glass on the counter. He holds the other glass up to me as if to offer a toast. “Cheers,” he says. “And God bless our differences, too.” Then he turns and walks out of the room.

  Tom opens his beer and leans against the counter, looking at me. “What?” I say.

  “Just hoping for a little peace,” he says.

  “You’ve got it,” I say, heading out. But he takes me by the arm.

  “Wait, honey.”

  “Tom,” my father calls from the other room. “Peace?” Tom says to me.

  I look at him, and because he wants to, he reads acceptance in my face. They don’t even like you, I want to tell him. But I hold it back.

  “Come join us,” he says, turning from me. I watch him go down the hall, and then I move to the back door, half expecting to see James out on the porch. But there’s only the vast dark, and the thrown light of the doorway on the lawn, with my shadow in it. I step outside, close the door quietly. On the side patio, in the dark, I find my oldest, John, sitting alone in the portable hammock, struggling with the apparently loose hinges of a pair of scissors. In a little bare place in the trees beyond the end of the lawn, Ellie and Morgan are trying to jump rope. Ellie’s only five and can’t do it. Morgan, who’s seven, can. They’re arguing about the difference. John, just last week, celebrated his thirteenth birthday by cutting the skin above his anklebone with a paring knife he’d stolen from the kitchen. He’d been playing mumblety-peg with it. Someone at school had taught him the game, apparently.

  “What’re you doing?” I ask.

  He’s startled but quickly recovers, smiling at me, conning me. “I found these,” he says. Lately I can’t control him; I think of James with Brigitte in a place like Rome—so far away, and like a minute ago: the easy lies, the deceptions through half-truths, the feigned confusion. For a little space, like a heartbeat, I feel so very tired of everything, and the idea of holding onto some kind of love seems almost idiotic. In another time I’ll stand before my grown son with my own complications, and he will have his. Everything will have worn down between us. It’s hard to believe anything matters much, and I can hear my father’s voice in the other room, holding forth. He’s lecturing Tom now, and Tom—because he’s had too much to drink—is interested. It’s the old pattern of the first night when my father makes one of his stops. Tomorrow they’ll both be hung over, and they’ll tease about it, as if they’ve accomplished something, traveled through something risky and wonderful.

  I reach down and take the scissors from John. “Come on,” I say. “Time for a bath.”

  “A bath,” he says. “It’s early. It’s not all the way dark yet.”

  “Come on, honey,” I say, nearly crying. “Please don’t argue with me about it.”

  He gets up, starts out to collect the other two. Their contending voices come from the shadows in the yard; they’re only shapes now. Beyond them the moon is bright. I go and stand in the doorway and wait for them, and I can hear Tom laughing in the other room.

  In a little while James will come home. He’ll have had a few; he’ll have fortified himself. He’ll come in and find his father sitting with Tom, and they’ll all be drunk no matter what else they are. It’ll be what you’d expect. Tom will mediate, will be friendly and concerned—they’ll be polite for his benefit, these men who don’t have any idea of his qualities, his tenderness and grace, his humor; his dear old, simple wish to be pleasant. His wonder about his own children, and his life that he attends to after he attends to theirs. Probably nothing much will get said that anyone remembers. My father will go home and write a play about a man he betrayed, and the play will be full of powerful remorse. It will be exactly what he truly feels but has never been able to express with people, just talking, saying things out. James will no doubt continue with his journey back to something—and perhaps he’ll travel to California soon. Tom will go to work, vaguely mad at himself for allowing them to look down on him but already forgetting the whole thing, already forgiving it. It is his nature to forgive, as it is mine to remember.

  But tonight, in the haze of what they have had to drink, they’ll find all sorts of things to say and laugh at and offer an opinion on, and they’ll be loud and sentimental and brotherly with each other. This is what is ahead, I think. I can see it clearly, as if it has already happened. My father, my brother and my husband. And I come to know, with a sense of discouragement like a swoon, that at a certain point in the night, while I lie in bed remembering myself at twelve years old—a little girl on a wide bed in an apartment in Rome, with a strange woman in the next room and no one to lean on, nothing at all to brace her—I’ll hear their voices on the other side of the wall, and I won’t be able to distinguish which of them is which.

  THE EYES OF LOVE

  This particular Sunday in the third year of their marriage, the Truebloods are leaving a gathering of the two families—a cookout at Kenneth’s parents’ that has lasted well into the night and ended with his father telling funny stories about being in the army in Italy just after the war. The evening has turned out to be exactly the kind of raucous, beery gathering Shannon said it would be, trying to beg off going. She’s pregnant, faintly nauseous all the time, and she’s never liked all the talk. She’s heard the old man’s stories too many times.

  “They’re good stories,” Kenneth said that morning as she poured coffee for them both.

  “I’ve heard every one of them at least twice,” said Shannon. “God knows how many times your mother has heard them.”

  He said, “You might’ve noticed everybody laughing when he tells them, Shannon. Your father laughs until I start thinking about his heart.”

  “He just wants to be a part of the group.”

  “He chokes on it,” Kenneth said, feeling defensive and oddly embarrassed, as if some unflattering element of his personality had been cruelly exposed. “Jesus, Shannon. Sometimes I wonder what goes through your mind.”

  “I just don’t feel like listening to it all,” she told him. “Does it have to be a statement of some kind if I don’t go? Can’t you just say I’m tired?” “Your father and sisters are supposed to be there.” “Well, I’m pregnant—can’t I be tired?”

  “What do you think?” Kenneth asked her, and she shook her head, looking discouraged and caught. “It’s just a cookout,” he went on. “Cheer up—maybe no one will want to talk.”

  “That i
sn’t what I mean, and you know it,” she said.

  Now she rolls the window down on her side and waves at everybody. “See you,” she calls as Kenneth starts the car. For a moment they are sitting in the roar and rattle of the engine, which backfires and sends up a smell of burning oil and exhaust. Everyone’s joking and calling to them, and Kenneth’s three brothers begin teasing about the battered Ford Kenneth lacks the money to have fixed. As always he feels a suspicion that their jokes are too much at his expense, home from college four years and still out of a job in his chosen field, there being no college teaching jobs to be had anywhere in the region. He makes an effort to ignore his own misgiving, and anyway most of what they say is obliterated by the noise. He races the engine, and everyone laughs. It’s all part of the uproar of the end of the evening, and there’s good feeling all around. The lawn is illuminated with floodlights from the top of the house, and Kenneth’s father stands at the edge of the sidewalk with one arm over her father’s broad shoulders. Both men are a little tight.

  “Godspeed,” Kenneth’s father says, with a heroic wave.

  “Good-bye,” says Shannon’s father.

  The two men turn and start unsteadily back to the house, and the others, Kenneth’s mother and brothers and Shannon’s two younger sisters, are applauding and laughing at the dizzy progress they make along the walk. Kenneth backs out of the driveway, waves at them all again, honks the horn and pulls away.

  Almost immediately his wife gives forth a conspicuous expression of relief, sighing deeply and sinking down in the seat. This makes him clench his jaw, but he keeps silent. The street winds among trees in the bright fan of his headlights; it’s going to be a quiet ride home. He’s in no mood to talk now. She murmurs something beside him in the dark, but he chooses to ignore it. He tries to concentrate on driving, staring out at the road as if alone. After a little while she puts the radio on, looks for a suitable station, and the noise begins to irritate him, but he says nothing. Finally she gives up, turns the radio off. The windshield is dotting with rain. They come to the end of the tree-lined residential street, and he pulls out toward the city. Here the road already shimmers with water, the reflected lights of shops and buildings going on into the closing perspective of brightnesses ahead.