The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Is the door open?”

  “Go on in,” he said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Finish what you’re doing. You don’t have a lot of light left.”

  “Susan, I wouldn’t get it all if I had a whole day.”

  “Stay there,” she told him, and went on inside with Elaine, who, a moment later, came back out and stood watching him, her hands clasped behind her back.

  “You’re up high,” she said.

  “Think so?”

  “Granddaddy?”

  “Just a minute, honey.”

  He waited, listening. Susan was on the phone. He could not distinguish words, but he heard anger in the tone, and of course he was in the usual awkward position of not knowing what was expected, how he should proceed.

  “I can come up if I want to, right?” Elaine said.

  “But I’m not staying,” he told her, starting down.

  “Are you going to bring me up there?” she said.

  He said, “It’s scary here. The wind’s blowing, and it’s so high an eagle tried to build a nest in my hair.”

  “An eagle?”

  “Don’t you know what an eagle is?”

  “Is it like a bird?”

  When he had got to the ground, he laid the paint can, with the paintbrush across the lidless top, on the bottom step of the porch, then turned and lifted her into his arms. Everything, even this, required effort: the travail of an inner battle which he was always on the point of losing.

  “Goodness,” he said. “You’re getting so big.”

  She was a solid, dark-eyed girl with sweet-smelling breath, and creases appeared on her cheeks when she was excited or happy.

  “Is an eagle like a bird or not?”

  “An eagle,” he said, turning with her, “is exactly like a bird. And you know why?” A part of him was watching himself: a man stuffed with death, charming his granddaughter.

  She stared at him, smiling.

  “Because it is a bird,” he said, extending his arms so she rode above his head.

  “Don’t,” she called out, but she was still smiling.

  He brought her back down. “I want a kiss. You don’t have a kiss for me?”

  “No,” she said in the tone she used when she meant to be shy with him.

  “Are you in a bad mood?”

  She shook her head, but the smile was gone.

  “You don’t even have a kiss for me?”

  She sighed. “Well, Granddaddy, I can’t because I’m just exhausted.” “You poor old thing,” he said, resisting the temptation to suppose she had half-consciously divined something from merely looking into his eyes.

  “Put me down now,” she said. “Okay?”

  He did so, kissed the top of her head, the shining hair. She went off into the yard, stopping to examine the white blooms of clover dotting that part of the lawn. It was her way. She enjoyed being watched, and this was a ritual the two of them had often played out together. He would observe her and try to seem puzzled and curious, and occasionally she would glance his way, obviously wanting to make certain of his undivided attention. Sometimes they would play a game in which they both narrowly missed each other’s gaze. They would repeat the pattern until she began to laugh, and then all the motions would become exaggerated.

  Now she held her dress out from her sides, facing him. “Granddaddy, what do you think of me?”

  Pierced to his heart, he said, “I think you’re so beautiful.”

  She sighed. “I know.”

  Behind him, in the house, he heard Susan’s voice.

  “Mommy’s mad at Daddy again,” Elaine said.

  She stood there thinking, and then she did something he recognized as a characteristic gesture, a jittery motion she wasn’t quite aware of: her long, dark hair hung down on either side of her face, and occasionally she reached up with her left hand and tucked the strands of it behind the ear on that side of her head. The one ear showed.

  In the house, Susan was shouting into the phone. “I don’t care about that. I don’t care.”

  “Daddy was cussing,” Elaine said. “It made Mommy cry.”

  Susan’s voice came from inside the house. “I don’t care what anybody has or hasn’t got.”

  “Grandaddy,” Elaine said. “You’re not watching me.”

  “Okay, baby,” he said, “I’m watching you.”

  “See my dress?”

  “Beautiful,” he said.

  “Granddaddy, are you coming with me?” Again, she tucked the strands of hair behind the one ear. He walked over to her and, when she reached for it, gave her his hand.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Oh, for a walk.”

  She took him in a wide circle, around the perimeter of the front yard.

  “Isn’t this nice,” she said.

  A girl the bulk of whose life would be led in the next century. The thought made him pause.

  “Granddaddy, come on,” she said impatiently. “Men are so slow.” “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’ll try to do better.”

  Her mother’s voice came to them from the house. “You can do without a radio in your car.”

  “Mommy wants to see Grandmom,” Elaine said.

  “What about me?” he said, meaning to try teasing her.

  “Grandmom,” Elaine said with an air of insistence.

  There had been times during the months of his daughter’s recent troubles when he had sensed a kind of antipathy in her attitude toward him which was almost abstract, as though in addition to other complications she had come to view him only in light of his gender. He had even spoken to his wife about this. “I suppose since I’m a representative of the same sex to which her ex-husband belongs, I’m guilty by association.”

  “Stop that,” his wife said. “She’s upset, and she wants to talk to her mother. There’s nothing wrong with that. Besides, don’t you think it’s time you stopped interpreting everything to be about you?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “I’m clearly not in this at all. I’m the ineffectual, insensitive Daddy kept in the dark.”

  “Come on, William.”

  His wife’s name was Elizabeth. But for almost forty years he had been calling her Cat, for the first three letters of her middle name, which was Catherine. Some of their friends did so as well, and she signed her cards and letters with a cartoon cat, long-whiskered and smiling, a decidedly wicked look in its eye. She had even had the name printed on the face of the checkbook: it read William and Cat Wallingham. They were one of the few married couples in Stuart Circle Court these days. “The only traditional couple,” William would say, “in this cul-de-sac.” And in what his wife and daughter would indicate was his way of joking at the wrong time and with the wrong words, he would go on to point out that this was almost literally true. The college nearby, where he had spent the bulk of his working life as an administrator, had begun to expand in recent years, and the neighborhood seemed always to be shifting; houses were going up for sale, or being rented. The tenants came and went without much communication. Living arrangements seemed confused or uncertain. And there were no older couples nearby anymore.

  The only other married people in the cul-de-sac, as far as they knew, were a stormy young couple who had already been through two trial separations, but who were quite helplessly in love with each other. The young woman had confided in Cat. Occasionally William saw this woman working in her small fenced yard—an attractive, slender girl wearing tight jeans and a smock, looking not much out of high school. He almost never saw the husband, whose job required travel. But it was often the case that they were in the middle of some turbulence or other, and sometimes Cat talked about them as if they were part of the family, important in her sphere of concerns. Last year, William would come home from work (it was the last one hundred days before his retirement; he had been counting them down on a calendar fixed to the wall in the den) and find Cat sitting in the living room with the young neighb
or, teary-eyed, embarrassed to have him there, already getting up to excuse herself and go back to her difficult life.

  When his daughter’s marriage began to break, William found himself thinking of this couple across the way, their tumultuous separations and reconciliations, their fractious union that was apparently so … well, glib, and also, in some peculiar emotional way, serviceable. Or at least it seemed so from the distance of the other side of the street. He had felt a kind of amusement about them, waffling back and forth, ready to walk away from each other with the first imagined slight or defection, no matter their talk of love, their supposed passion. And during the crucial beginning of Susan’s divorce, he’d found it hard to take her crisis seriously. It had felt so much the same, coming in to find Susan sitting there with the moist eyes and the handkerchief squeezed into her fist, showing the same anxiousness to get away from him. Perhaps Susan still held this all against him; and he knew he had seemed badly insensitive. In fact he has bungled everything, since he rather liked Susan’s husband and honestly believed that the two of them were better together than apart. He had made these feelings known, and now that she was in the process of getting the divorce, she had distanced herself from him.

  “Granddaddy,” Elaine said, pulling him, then letting go, “I don’t want to go for a walk anymore.” She ran across the yard to the largest of two willow trees, under which there was an inner tube hung on a rope. Parting the dropping branches, she entered the shade there, and in a moment she’d put her head and chest through the inner tube. She lifted her small feet and suspended herself, swinging, obviously having forgotten him. He waited a minute, and when he was certain she was occupied, went into the house. It was cool in the dim hallway. Susan made a shadow at the other end, still talking on the phone. She did not look up as he approached.

  “I know that,” she said, “I know.”

  He waited.

  “I don’t care what he says. It’s been late every month, and this is not amicable. This has ceased to be amicable.”

  He went back out onto the porch. Elaine had lost interest in the swing, was standing with her hands on it, staring out at the road, singing to herself. He walked along the front of the house to where the porch ended in flagstone stairs. His wife had planted rose bushes here, and they climbed the trellis he’d erected, forming a thorny arch under which he stood.

  Part of his daily portion of trouble was that he had been having difficulty in the nights: his dreams were pervaded with a nameless dread. When he drifted off, it was with the knowledge that he would be awake with the dawn, feeling nothing of his old appetite for the freshest hours of the day, finding himself sapped of energy, vaguely fearful, sick at heart, and more gloomy than the day before.

  “Get busy doing something,” his wife had told him. “You were never the type to sit around and let things get the best of you.”

  No. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to say the word aloud.

  “I’m going to make an appointment for you.”

  “I’m not going to any damn head doctors. There’s nothing wrong with me that I can’t take care of myself.”

  He could not put his finger on exactly where or how this present misery had begun to take hold, but it had moved in him with the insidious incremental growth of a malignancy. The first inkling of it had come to him nearly a year ago, on his seventy-fourth birthday, when the thought occurred to him, almost casually, as though it concerned someone else, that he had gone beyond the age at which his father’s life ended. He had the thought, marked it with little more than mild interest—he might even have mentioned it to Cat—and then he experienced a sudden, fierce gust of desolation, a taste of this awful gloom. The recognition had come, and what followed it had felt like a leveling force inside him. But that feeling passed, and diere had been good days—wonderful days and good weeks—between then and now. He would not have believed that the thing could seep back, that it could blossom slowly in him, changing only for the worse. Tonight, it was nearly insupportable.

  One of the tenets of the religion he had practiced most of his adult life was that if one kept up the habits of faith, then faith would be granted. He had hoped the same was true of just going through the days.

  Susan came out and slammed the door shut behind her.

  “Everything okay?” he managed.

  She stirred, seemed to notice him, then looked out at the street. “I hate this time of day.”

  He thought she would go on to say more, and when she didn’t, he searched for some response. But she had already left him, was striding over to Elaine. Perhaps she might be about to leave, and how badly he wanted not to be alone! When she lifted Elaine and put her back on the inner tube, he hurried over to them, eager to be hospitable. Elaine sat in the swing with her chubby legs straight out and demanded that she be pushed higher, faster. Susan obliged her. “Only for a little while,” she said.

  “Mom should be here any minute,” William said.

  “Where’d she go, anyway?”

  “She was going to get some Chinese. Neither of us felt like doing anything in the kitchen. I had this—touching up to do.”

  “I don’t want to get in the way of dinner,” she said.

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Mommy, push me higher.”

  “I’m doing the best I can, Elaine.”

  “You didn’t like the swings when you were Elaine’s age,” he said. “Do you remember?”

  “I was a-f-r-a-i-d,” Susan said. “I don’t want her to be that way.” “Stop spelling,” Elaine said. “You be quiet and swing.”

  William said, “Do you remember when I used to push you in this swing?”

  She touched his arm. “Do you know how often you ask me that kind of question?”

  “You don’t recall it, though.”

  “Do you recall asking me this same question last week?”

  “Well,” he said, “I guess I don’t. No.”

  She frowned. “I’m teasing you.”

  “Well?” he said. “Do you remember?”

  “I don’t remember,” she told him. “You dwell on things too much.”

  He said, “You sound like your mother.”

  “It’s true. You’ve always been that way.”

  This irritated him. “Since the beginning of Time,” he said.

  “Men are such babies. Can’t you take a little teasing?” “Well, if I’m going to be asked to represent a whole sex every time I do any damn thing at all, I guess not.”

  “Oh, and I suppose you never talk about women that way.”

  “I always thought such talk was disrespectful.”

  “Okay, I won’t tease, then. All right?”

  They said nothing for a few moments.

  “Was that Sam you were talking to on the phone?”

  “At first.”

  “Higher,” Elaine said.

  “Hold on,” said Susan.

  He walked back to the porch and sat down on the bottom step, watching the two of them in the softening shade of the tree. The sun was nearing the line of dark horizon to the west, and through the haze it looked as though its flames were dying out. It was enormous, bigger than it ever seemed in midday. His daughter, still standing under the filamentous shade of the willow tree, turned to look at him, apparently just noticing that he had walked away from her. He put both hands on his knees, trying to appear satisfied and comfortable. But his heart was sinking. She walked over to stand before him. “Did you and Mom have a fight or something?” she asked.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Ha.”

  “We never fight anymore.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  “I can’t think why.” He smiled at her.

  “You bicker all the time instead of fighting.”

  He said, “What’s the difference, I wonder?” A moment later he said, “Are the two of you talking about me?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “What’s there to talk about?” he
said.

  “Dad.”

  “We’ve been married almost forty years,” he said. “What’s there to talk about?”

  “Are you saying you’re bored?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Are we going to have a fight?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Is your mother bored?” he said.

  “You don’t think she’d tell me a thing like that, do you?”

  “I was just asking.”

  “To tell you the truth, she doesn’t talk about you at all.”

  “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t. You know, there’s not much to say.”

  “Do you still love each other?” his daughter asked suddenly. “Sam and I lasted five years and I can’t imagine why. It’s kind of hard to believe in married love, you know.”

  “Can’t judge the rest of the world by what happens to you,” he said. “Married love takes a little more work, maybe.”

  “Why do I feel like you’re talking about me and not Sam.”

  “I’m not,” he said. “I didn’t have anybody specific in mind.”

  As they watched, the young woman from across the street drove up. She got out of the car and made her way over to them, having obviously come from her job at the college: she wore a bright flower-print dress and high heels. She was carrying a package.

  “Cat’s not here?” she said, pausing. She had addressed Susan.

  “She’ll be back soon,” William said.

  The young woman hesitated, then came forward. “Could you give her this for me? It’s a scarf and earrings.”

  “Why don’t you give it to her?” William said, smiling at her. “Sit here and wait with us.”

  “No, I’ve really—I’ve got to go.”

  Susan took the package from her.

  “There’s a—I put a card with it.”

  “Very good,” Susan said. “It’ll make her happy.”

  “We’re moving,” the young woman said. “He got a job back home. I get to go home.”

  “I’m sure she’ll want to see you before you go.”

  “Oh, of course. We won’t be leaving until December.”

  “Thank you,” William said as the young woman went back along the walk.

  They watched her cross to her house and go in, and then Susan said, “You know the trouble with us?”