Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea

by Richard Bausch

Stop it. Lord, please.

  For a few seconds, he was aware of the stirring on the other side of the church without quite attending to it. Father Soberg had walked in, looking hurried and vaguely disgruntled, barely genuflecting as he walked across the central aisle, in front of the sacrament. The priest lighted a votive candle, and stood before it, praying for a time, then went back across the aisle, again barely genuflecting. As he started down the side aisle, he saw Marshall and stopped, frowning, apparently trying to decide about him. Marshall bowed his head, but now the other moved toward him, stepped into the pew, and walked up to him.

  “Aren’t you running a little late, Walter?”

  “A little,” the young man said. “Not really. It doesn’t start till six-thirty.”

  “Did you want to see me?” Father Soberg was in his mid-forties—with dark, close-cut hair and a shadow of stubble on his bony cheeks. He had large, flat-fingered hands, and his squarish face looked more stern than he ever was. There was something almost angry about his features, the dark brows set in a perpetual frowning arc. He had been out in the rain, too.

  “If you have something to do,” Marshall said.

  “I’ve just been doing what I had to do.” Father Soberg sat down, but in the posture of someone who is about to get up and leave. “Everything’s fine. You looked troubled—and really like you don’t want to be bothered. That’s why I hesitated.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Your face is pale as death,” said Father Soberg. “Are you ill?”

  “I don’t think so, Father.”

  “How’s your mother.”

  “She’s okay—she doesn’t like the job at the high school as much—now that I’m not there.”

  “You tell her I ask after her, don’t you?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Good lad. Well, you’re all right, then?”

  “I’m engaged to be married,” Marshall said suddenly. It had come out of him with the force of a cough.

  Father Soberg smiled, tilted his head to one side. “When did this happen?”

  “Just now,” said Marshall. His voice croaked oddly. He repeated it. “Just now.”

  “You seem rather astounded,” Father Soberg said. “It happens every day, son. Though I will say you’re a little young.”

  “I know,” said Marshall with more emphasis than he had intended.

  “Do I know the girl?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, it’s a big decision. Bound to make a man nervous.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Is she Catholic?”

  “She says she’ll convert.” The young man heard the discouragement in his own voice.

  “Don’t you want her to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t mean to press it. I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right,” Marshall said. “Really.”

  “I’m sure she’s a wonderful girl.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Well, there you are.” The priest touched his shoulder, looking into the dimness at the back of the church. “You know I’m being transferred.”

  “You’re being transferred?”

  “Your mother didn’t—” Father Soberg seemed puzzled. “Well, it’s to this—Vietnam place. South, of course. A city called Saigon, in South Vietnam. One year, with the mission there. Mostly to help close it down. Then I don’t know where I’ll be.”

  “South Vietnam,” Marshall said.

  “Yes, I know. And we just bombed them in the north.” Father Soberg looked down, and sighed. “Well. Say hello to your mother for me. And congratulations.”

  “Thanks, Father.”

  He moved to the side aisle again and on to the heavy doors leading out into the street. Marshall watched him go. The door closed slowly, and soon the church was quiet again. Except that everything in the place seemed reduced to its essential properties: stone and paint, wood and steel, plaster and glass. Even the crucifix: The face of the crucified Christ looked merely dyspeptic and irritable, a badly rendered human face on a statue supported by steel wires bolted to the rafters. Walter Marshall closed his eyes and tried to pray.

  Somewhere, in the books he had been poring over, he had read that the journey of a soul toward perfection was a journey away from distractions.

  Chapter 3

  At the enclosed bus stand on Eighteenth Street and L, Albert Waple stood, his textbook held up to his face, reading. When Marshall approached, the other peered out at him.

  “Why’re you standing here, Albert? Aren’t you coming to class?”

  “Sure,” Albert said, still squinting. “You look different. I recognized you, but you do look different.”

  “I don’t know how,” said Marshall.

  “It’s not the clothes.” Albert was studying him.

  Marshall resisted the sensation of annoyance. “Do I look pale?”

  “Ah. It’s the hair.”

  He felt caught out. “No,” he said.

  “Yep,” said Albert. “You’ve done something. Did you get it cut?”

  “No.”

  “You’re combing it different, then.”

  “I’ve been combing it this way for a long time. Since before I met you.”

  Albert stepped closer. “Maybe it’s the light.”

  “Look, could we get off the subject of my hair?”

  “Are you sensitive about it?”

  “Why would I be sensitive about it? It’s hair.”

  Albert seemed genuinely puzzled. “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Come on, Albert.”

  “No, I just thought you looked different tonight.”

  “Do I look pale?”

  Albert studied him. “No more than usual.”

  “Maybe I do need a haircut.” Marshall tried to seem as careless and as uninterested as possible.

  “You know, it looks like somebody—reminds me of somebody—if it wasn’t so blond.”

  “What’re you doing at the bus stop, anyway?”

  “Waiting for the bus.”

  “You’re not coming to class?”

  “I have a surprise,” Albert said.

  “Okay.” Marshall waited. After a few moments, it became clear that the other had started reading again. “Well, what?” Marshall said.

  Albert peered at him. “I’m sorry?”

  “What’s the surprise?”

  “It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you.”

  “It’s a surprise for me?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’ve got a surprise for you, too.”

  “Okay,” Albert said. “You go first.”

  “I’m getting married. Alice and me.” The words seemed empty.

  Albert stared.

  “Well?”

  “That’s great,” said Albert. “You and Alice.”

  Marshall looked down the street at the headlights of cars stopped at the red light across from where Connecticut Avenue and Eighteenth Street crossed. From the bus stop you could see most of the length of Eighteenth, with its hotel fronts and shops and movie theaters and bars. The lights seemed about to dissolve in the rain. Albert stood there smiling, with that look of myopic calm that was always dimly embarrassing.

  “Well, you’re getting married, aren’t you? Is it so strange for me to do the same?”

  “No, I said—it’s great. Don’t mind me. I’ve always been slow on the uptake.”

  “I don’t know why you should act so funny about it.”

  “It’s wonderful,” Albert said. “Who’s acting funny?”

  “Nobody,” Marshall said. “Maybe it’s just me.”

  “When did you ask her?”

  Marshall looked down the street again. “Tonight—a half hour ago.”

  “That’s great,” his friend said. “We can have a celebration.”

  “I don’t know,” said Marshall. “Maybe another time.”

  “No time like the present—because, remember, I have a surprise for
you.” Albert shifted a little, shaking his head. “I can’t keep it a secret anymore. Guess who’s coming on the bus?”

  “Who?”

  “Emma.” He nodded proudly.

  “Emma.”

  Now his deep eyes seemed to narrow, as though something had flown at him from the night outside the booth.

  “Oh, Emma,” Marshall said.

  “I told you one day she’d do it. Her aunt Patty put her on the bus in Alexandria an hour ago. The bus driver has instructions to let her off at this stop.”

  “That’s great,” Marshall said, staring off at the traffic again. “That’s wonderful.”

  “It’s not every blind girl who’ll make a trip like that, just to meet her fiancé’s friend.”

  “I guess not,” Marshall said.

  They were quiet. Albert watched the street, squinting in the light.

  “Just to meet me,” said Marshall. “That’s something.”

  “So you have to make a big deal out of it,” Albert said. “Okay?”

  “Well—it is a big deal.”

  “Not that she couldn’t do it every day, you know. Emma’s no shrinking violet.”

  “I can’t wait to meet her, Albert.”

  Albert said, “I’m so happy tonight. What a happy night.”

  “You always seem happy,” Marshall told him.

  Albert was thinking of something else. “I had to work real hard getting her aunt Patty to allow this. Emma’s only eighteen—and Aunt Patty—well, it’s hard to let go. I had such a bad time figuring out how I was going to tell her that Emma and I wanted to get married.”

  Marshall waited for him to tell the story. But Albert merely went back to his book, his face disappearing into it.

  “How did you?” Marshall asked.

  “How’d I what?”

  This happened a lot. “Tell Aunt Patty that you and Emma were going to get married.”

  “Oh,” Albert said, laughing. “I didn’t.”

  “You mean you haven’t told her yet?”

  “Emma told her. We walked into the room and Emma said, ‘Aunt Patty, Albert wants to talk to you about something.’ And I saw Aunt Patty turn her face toward me—couldn’t see her eyes, of course. Just the shape. So there I am, and I open my big stupid mouth to tell her, and nothing comes out. A complete utter nothing from nowhere nohow, no way. I couldn’t even draw a breath. And then Emma told her.”

  “What happened?”

  “Aunt Patty broke out in hives.”

  Marshall smiled at him.

  “She’s a funny lady. Whenever she’s really happy or really sad, she breaks out in hives.”

  “She was happy,” Marshall said.

  Albert shook his head. “No.” It sounded almost like a question. “I wouldn’t say she was happy.”

  “But she’s happy now.”

  “No.”

  They were quiet.

  “Emma’s young, you know. And Aunt Patty can see.”

  Marshall was puzzled by this, and Albert must have sensed it.

  “I can still see, too,” he said. “I know what happens to the mirror every time I look into it. I don’t make the best scenery in the world.”

  “Scenery isn’t everything,” Marshall said, disliking the sense as he spoke that his words were automatic, not really felt.

  “You’re a good friend,” Albert told him.

  They had known each other since the first week of radio school, a year ago in September, because for a time, before Albert had taken his small room in town, they had been passengers on the same bus home to Virginia. Albert liked to tell people things about himself, and he did so with such great faith in the kindness with which it would be received that one quickly felt protective of him, and wanted not to disappoint him or make him feel, even by a slip of the tongue, that this sentimental assumption was mistaken. Marshall had never asked him home, and seldom called him at his own place—they had met only three or four times outside school, in fact, several times for lunch with Alice—and yet when Marshall arrived each school night, Albert was always there, always behaving without any tentativeness at all, as though they were the best of friends. Marshall liked him while half-consciously entertaining a curious sense of superiority to him—feeling himself in possession of a worldliness the other lacked. Albert trusted people too much, and Marshall had seen the looks on the faces of strangers those nights on the bus to Arlington.

  He had told Marshall in the first minutes they knew each other that Emma was blind from birth, that her father had been killed in the war, at Anzio, and she had lost her mother before she was two years old. And that she had been Albert’s teacher when he set out to learn how to read Braille. They had fallen in love, he said, in a matter of seconds. Then he smiled and asked if Marshall minded a little exaggeration now and then. “Anyway,” he’d said. “We fell in love and I asked her to marry me after the second lesson. Does that seem too soon?”

  “It’s fast,” Marshall had told him.

  “No,” Albert had said, picking at his own long, acne-scarred face, “it’s definite.”

  Albert liked to make jokes at his own expense, but he was proud of his ability to be decisive. It was a quality he tried to cultivate in himself.

  “I’d like to wait with you,” Marshall said now. “But I have to do some research in the school library. I’m doing commercials from 1945, remember, for the history of broadcasting.”

  “Oh.” Albert appeared crestfallen. His features registered all his emotions with a strange exaggeration. “I thought we might cut out of class after the first hour and go get a sandwich or something.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marshall said. “I really can’t.”

  “I won’t stand in the way of progress,” said Albert, quickly regaining his cheerfulness.

  The truth was that while Marshall did have work to do—he had been asked by the Spanish radio announcer to write a commercial for an office supply company, and there was indeed research for the class in the history of broadcasting to do—it was nothing that couldn’t wait. He wanted to get to the school the half hour early to see Natalie, who usually waited in the library for classes to start. For the minute it took him to make his excuse to Albert, he had forgotten Alice altogether.

  Remembering her brought a small whimper up out of the back of his throat.

  “What?” Albert said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Well,” Albert said. “I’ve got some reading to do, too.” He waved, then turned and put the book back up to the tip of his nose.

  “’Bye,” Marshall said.

  Albert looked up. His visage was almost crowlike—that long nose and the deeply recessed eyes. “We’ll come get you.”

  Marshall waved at him and went on, and when he had gone a few paces he stopped and turned. There his friend was—a tall, stooped, shadowy figure in the light of the booth, the mist trailing down out of the falling darkness.

  Lately each evening, just as he approached the school, having allowed himself as little thought of Natalie as possible, he would look up to see her in the window of the library. If she saw him, she might wave. Usually, she was reading a book, studying. And sometimes she wasn’t there at all. Sometimes, it was as though the building were haunted with her.

  Tonight, though, she was sitting in the window overlooking the street. Seeing her, his heart lifted, and then sank.

  He would be a married man by June.

  As he went up the front steps, he was aware that she could see him from where she sat. He bounded up the stairs and lost his footing near the top, barking his knee on the concrete. This, he knew, was the just punishment of God. Managing to stand up, and to seem in charge of himself, he made his way onto the stone porch. The pain made his eyes water. When he glanced at the window, she lifted one slender hand to wave at him.

  The foyer of the school was always dim—a long, thin strip of fading linoleum down the middle of it, entering a narrow hallway with bare gray walls and tall doorway
s to classrooms on either side. The hall ended at a closed white-painted door that, as far as he knew, no one ever entered or came from. To the right of the foyer was a narrow wooden stairway, painted a glossy dark green, creaking with age, at the top of which was the metal-framed entrance to the D’Allessandro School for Broadcasting, with its letters painted in red on the glass doors. The broadcasting school and the downstairs night college were both owned and operated by Mr. D’Allessandro and his wife, with Mrs. D’Allessandro primarily responsible for the night college, though Mr. D’Allessandro also taught a course there in the etymology of words (now and then he talked about this class, and about the euphony of language when utilized by the right voice, the voice that understood what the notes were and struck the right ones). To the left of the foyer was the night college’s general office—a small room, with a desk and telephone for the secretary, walls with the framed diplomas of Mr. and Mrs. D’Allessandro, and glass-framed photographs of both of them with various important people (Mr. D’Allessandro had done broadcasting for the Voice of America during Eisenhower’s first term, and there were pictures of him shaking hands with John Foster Dulles and Averell Harriman to prove it). To the left of this room was the arched entryway of the small library, whose tall, leaded window looked out onto the street.

  Walter Marshall stalled for a minute, pretending to look at the photographs, then tried to amble into the library, hoping his face would not show the strain of what the pain in his knee was doing to him. The broadcasting school’s books were all along one wall, opposite literature and history and social science, which, such as it was, made up the rest of the collection. The room itself wasn’t much larger than a private parlor, really, and indeed it was furnished that way—there were sofas and easy chairs placed in the corners, an oak table and chairs at the center.

  Marshall sat at the table and opened one of the books, a history of broadcasting. He looked over at Natalie and smiled. Always, he had felt the necessity of waiting for her to make the first move to talk. She rose and walked over to him. There was a bronze cast to her lovely skin, and the healthy protein shine of her black hair made her look Polynesian. “How are you this evening, Walter?”

  “Fine,” he said.