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

by Richard Bausch

  “Oh? And what way is that? Now suddenly it’s a sin to appreciate God’s creation? Now who’s got the dirty mind, here? You? Me? Somebody else?”

  He was silent.

  “No harm in looking, ja?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But you must concentrate on your work, too. Is this not so?”

  “I’ll—concentrate,” Marshall said.

  Wolfschmidt reached over and pushed the button on the machine, and with a high-pitched gasp of air it sprang to life. “See that you do,” he said, an amused expression on his blocklike face.

  Wolfschmidt, as everyone who worked for him knew soon enough, had been born and raised in Germany, his family having come to America in the mid-thirties, when his father, an architect of national repute, had decided that the Nazi party was not going to be the salvation of the German people after all. Wolfschmidt Sr. brought his wife and son to live in Washington, and still lived there, within a few blocks of the bureau. Occasionally he visited the mailroom—a diminutive, hawk-nosed, white-haired gentleman with fierce, ice-colored eyes and bushy white brows. Wolfschmidt Jr. bustled around this very fragile-looking gentleman who did not quite come up to his shoulders, and seemed happy to see him, though it was painfully clear that his life as the manager of a mailroom was a fact about which there had been some conflict: The old gentleman never failed to be grumpy and abrupt, with that attitude people take when convinced that their children are wasting valuable time. After each visit, Mr. Wolfschmidt was bad-tempered for days.

  “Life will be so much better for everyone if the work is done to satisfaction,” he said now, turning away from Marshall. It was a saying he liked to use—probably taken from the angry little father.

  For some reason, all this made the young man feel lonely and depressed. He spent the rest of the morning in a kind of fog, watching Wolfschmidt out of the corner of his eye, trying to concentrate on his work, and thinking of Alice and her wedding plans.

  Lunch hour, he walked with her across the street and up the block to the little sandwich shop where they had run into Mr. D’Allessandro—an L-shaped room, with a window at one end, looking out onto the street. They sat in the window end and watched the passersby. The day was sunny and clear, with a strong, warm, southerly wind that kicked up dust and grime from the gutters. Men clutching their hats rushed through a storm of leaves, paper scraps, and blown dirt.

  “I missed my bus and had to drive today, and I’m glad I did,” Alice said, watching the dust kick up out of the gutters. “It’s going to be so miserably warm.”

  “It’s just the wind. When the wind dies down, it’s not so bad.”

  “Hey,” Alice said. “You haven’t even kissed me hello.” She closed her eyes and leaned toward him, puckering.

  Embarrassed, he met her halfway.

  When their lips touched, she opened her eyes and looked at him. “You’re looking.”

  “No I wasn’t.”

  “Well, it wasn’t much of a kiss.”

  “This is a public place,” he told her. “We’re sitting in a window.”

  “People kiss all the time in public, now. I think it’s neat.”

  “Alice,” he said. But he was at a loss.

  “It’s the religion,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

  This irked him. “No.”

  “Do you love me?” The look on her face softened him, and made him sorry.

  “Of course,” he said.

  “You do, don’t you?”

  “I just said—” He stopped, looked at the room. “I said I do. Jeez, Alice. Are you teasing me?”

  “I’m dead serious,” she said with a half smile.

  “Well, I love you, okay?” The words leaving his lips had the quality of recited lines.

  “I can’t help it,” she told him. “Actually, I’m a little insecure.”

  “It’s fine, really. I know the feeling.”

  “Your mother’s not happy about us, though.”

  “I said she’s fine. Really. What about your father?”

  “Oh, he’s—fine.”

  “You told him.”

  “First thing.”

  “And he didn’t react?”

  She smiled. “You sound like me, now.”

  “My mother’s coming to your party,” he said.

  Alice smiled. “Then everything’s set.”

  “I have to ask you something.”

  The waiter came—a tall, skinny boy with long sideburns and an overbite. They ordered chicken sandwiches and Cokes and watched him write it all down laboriously in a little spiral notebook. When he had gone, Alice turned to the window and rested her chin on her palms. “It’s such a beautiful day from this side of the glass.”

  She seemed to her fiancé to be posing for him. He said, “If it weren’t so windy.”

  “I said, ‘on this side of the glass.’”

  “I heard you.”

  “Actually, I love the wind.” This was said with a great dramatic tossing of her hair.

  He couldn’t look at her. He studied the backs of his hands on the table.

  “Don’t you?”

  “I never thought about it that way,” he said. “One way or the other. Wind. You know, it’s never been a big subject of talk around our house. During the last tornado, we forgot to even mention it because of the Bengal tigers in the foyer.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic, Walter.”

  “I was trying to be funny.”

  On the sidewalk before them a man stopped and put one hand to his face. Apparently, a speck of something had blown into his eye. Another man paused to help him, and they moved off slowly. Marshall carefully folded his napkin, feeling as though this little tableau had been a kind of comment from the world concerning what she had said about the wind.

  “On The Tonight Show, last night, Johnny Carson danced with Pearl Bailey.”

  “I didn’t see it,” Marshall said.

  “They did a duet, actually. A love song. Really sweet and friendly and kidding, you know. It made me think about the way things could be if only people would stop and think. I mean, here’s this colored woman, you know, teasing and being affectionate with this white guy on national TV. You—you see what I mean? It wasn’t as if there had ever been anything like a store or a restaurant where she wouldn’t be welcome because of the color of her skin. I mean, who could think not to welcome Pearl Bailey? And they looked like such good friends. Why can’t the rest of the country take the hint?”

  “They probably are.”

  “We have some decisions to make,” she said after a pause.

  He waited. She seemed content to sit, watching the street. It was as though she wanted to give him time to think. But then he wondered if she expected him to respond in some way. He cleared his throat and murmured, “Yes.”

  She said, “What?”

  “I said ‘Yes.’”

  “Oh.” She stared out the window again. The street was empty, with a stripe of shade moving in it, some cloud being hauled across the hot sky by the wind.

  “We have to decide,” she said.

  He said, “I have to ask you something.”

  They had spoken at almost the same instant, and they laughed nervously.

  “You first,” she said.

  He hesitated. Before he could explain, the waiter was putting their sandwiches down.

  “It’s about your mother, isn’t it?” Alice said. “She wants me to convert.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not it.”

  “You told her I would, though, didn’t you?”

  He couldn’t remember if he had. He said, “It’s not about that.”

  “Actually, my father has a problem with it.”

  “He does?”

  She nodded, biting into her sandwich. “Turns out he doesn’t like your church much.”

  “My church—” Marshall looked at her.

  “I didn’t know he was such an anti-Papist,” she said.

  “Papist?” He had ne
ver heard the word, though he felt the sense of recognizing it as she spoke it.

  She nodded.

  “He doesn’t like church—”

  “Not just any church,” she interrupted him. “Your church.” She took a bite of the sandwich, and thought a moment. “Actually, it’s not that he doesn’t like Catholics, especially. He has trouble with the institution. You’ll be fine.” She went on eating, holding the sandwich with both hands. He saw that her fingernails were painted a soft pink, and that she had stained the edge of her Coke glass with lipstick. He felt a sudden wave of disbelief, watching her tuck a piece of chicken into her mouth. It was as though he had just awakened, somehow, from a dream of life, and found himself here, with this strange young woman, this woman he did not know. “It’s simply a matter of getting used to the idea of me belonging to the institution,” she went on, talking through her chewing. “He’s really very happy for us. You’ll see.”

  He took a bite of his sandwich, though his appetite was gone.

  “Where are you?” she said, staring dreamily at him.

  “Pardon?” he said.

  She smiled, and put her sandwich down. There was a way she had of doing things like this, a certain fastidiousness of motion, as though the sandwich were a delicate mechanism with explosive charges embedded in it. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” she said. A tiny bit of chicken had lodged between her front teeth. He ran his tongue over his own teeth, and tried to concentrate on his sandwich. “Well?” she said.

  “I have to ask you something,” he managed.

  Folding her hands under her chin, she regarded him, and when he couldn’t speak right away, reached over and touched his cheek. “Do I make you nervous, now?”

  “No,” he said, unable to keep himself from recoiling.

  If she noticed this, she gave no sign of it. “Ask me anything,” she said, withdrawing her hand. “I’m all yours.”

  It took most of the rest of the lunch hour to make clear what the D’Allessandros wanted. This was not from any complexity in the request itself, of course, but merely that Marshall had difficulty saying it all out in plain words. Because he hesitated, she jumped to conclusions, heading everything in the wrong direction, requiring more clarification, and more hesitating. First, she assumed that Mr. D’Allessandro wanted to hold the wedding at his school, and she went off on a tangent about what a fine thing that would be, perhaps in conjunction with Marshall’s graduation. Then she supposed Mr. D’Allessandro had advised Marshall concerning getting married, and had even advised against it, so soon after high school. She said she knew there would be objections from all sides on that score, because she was older, and this would cause some people to feel the moral constraint of their opinions.

  It took more than a few moments to make her understand that the request had nothing to do with them as a newly engaged couple.

  When what he wanted was at last understood, she seemed rather puzzled as to what had been so difficult. “I don’t see the problem.”

  “I’m supposed to get your father to ask somebody big to come to the school.”

  “So?”

  “Someone like Edward R. Murrow.”

  “Yes?”

  Marshall was unable to respond to this.

  “Well, really, Walter. Do you think he’d refuse you? Now?”

  He couldn’t keep the exasperation out of his voice. “I don’t know.”

  “You’re going to be his son-in-law.”

  This had the effect of making him cramp up in his lower abdomen. “Excuse me,” he said, rather too loudly. “I’ll be right back.”

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  He couldn’t pause to answer her, but made his way, hurrying, to the men’s room. There, in that close, little, ammonia-smelling space, the feeling subsided. He washed his face, then stood quietly, trying to calm himself. His hair had come down across his forehead, and for a time he tried to set it back so that it would look like Kennedy’s. An instant later, he was assailed with a sense of himself as being rather ridiculous. He ran both hands through his hair, trying to make it go the way it seemed to want to. Nothing seemed quite right, and he was becoming aware of the time. In the one stall a man coughed deeply, then made an elaborate series of noises clearing his throat. Marshall saw the shoes, brown shoes with scuff marks on them, below the level of the stall, and something in his soul turned on the image, as if he had been shown a picture of some future version of himself—this hawking man with scuffed, dull-brown shoes, in a stall in the rest room of a sandwich shop in the city. The man blew his nose, coughed again, and spat.

  Outside, Alice had eaten the rest of her sandwich. She sat with her arms folded under her breasts, gazing at the street. “I know just the person for you,” she said.

  Marshall waited for her to go on.

  “Mitch Brightman.”

  “I thought you said he has a drinking problem.”

  “He likes to do this sort of thing, though. And he’s not so bad that he can’t put on a good show.”

  “Your father wouldn’t mind asking him?”

  “You can ask him yourself,” Alice said brightly. “This weekend.”

  On the way back to the office, she held his hand and swung it between them. The warm wind gusted, and even so, a chill went through him. He allowed himself to be guided along the sidewalk. “Who do you want to invite to the wedding?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  She stopped. “Is everything all right? You seem so depressed. Are you sure it’s all right with your mother?”

  “I’m not depressed,” he said.

  “You seem unhappy. Look, you shouldn’t worry about my dad, Walter. You’ll see.”

  He forced a smile. And he reminded himself that he had asked this girl to be his wife. He imagined what it might be like, coming home to her. He could not even see himself kissing her, for some reason, though he was quick to recall that such thoughts were occasions of sin. He attempted to clear his mind, to head off the impure thought.

  “Well.” She started walking again, still holding his hand. “What about your friends at school?”

  “There’s just Albert,” he said. “I don’t think any of the others would come.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know any of them that well.”

  “What about friends from high school?”

  “They’re all off at college. And none of them took the trouble to stay in touch with me.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “No,” he said.

  “So—Albert’s it?”

  “Albert’s the only friend of mine you’d want at your party.” But then he remembered Emma. “Well, and there’s his fiancée.”

  “Albert’s getting married, too?” This excited her. She let go of his hand and walked a few paces ahead, trying to contain herself. When she turned, she had clasped her hands under her chin again, and then she threw them wide. “I love it. When can I meet her?”

  He didn’t know, and yet to say this seemed somehow inappropriate. He simply stood there and weathered her excitement. She had walked back to him, and was resting her wrists on his shoulders.

  “Don’t you see how perfect it is, Walter? I wondered about poor Albert, and felt so bad for him in a way—so nice and kindly, and with all those physical problems, and it turns out even Albert’s got somebody. Oh, I feel good about this. I think we were meant to be happy, don’t you?”

  There were others in the street, and cars had come to a stop on the corner where they stood, with Alice turning slowly now and talking about how happy for Albert she was. “I liked him right from the start. Let’s have them come to the party, too. Will you see Albert today?”

  “I’ll see him tomorrow night, at class, I guess.”

  “You have to call him and invite him before something else gets in their way. Call him as soon as we get back.”

  The light changed. He didn’t remember coming up to it. They crossed the street in the blus
tery heat, and she took his hand once more. As they reached the enclosed entrance of the building, she turned to him and, throwing her arms around his neck, kissed him on the mouth. He thought of hell, the vivid slides the nuns had shown in religion class on Saturday mornings, and the voice that had said, “Listen to the cries of the damned as they fall into the pit,” and you heard the screams, and then the little bell dinged for the next slide.

  She let go and looked at him. “Do you ever French kiss?”

  “I did once,” he said.

  “Did you like it?”

  His blood moved. “I can’t discuss it,” he said.

  She nodded. “The religion, huh.”

  He pushed past her and went inside, and she followed.

  “I understand, honey.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “You’re not mad at me?”

  “No.”

  He walked to the bank of elevators and pushed the button and then thought of being on the elevator alone with her. “Maybe I’ll walk up,” he said. “It’s just the fourth floor for me.”

  “Walter, it’s all right, you know. We’re engaged.”

  “I know,” he told her. “But can’t we talk about this some other time? I have to go to work now.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Really.”

  The elevator opened.

  “I’ll walk up,” he said. “It’s only four flights.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” She got on and turned, waiting for him.

  He got on, too.

  When the doors closed she put her arms around his neck again and, before he could do anything about it, was kissing him, moving her hips against his and squeezing tight, so that the bones of her wrists seemed about to cut off the blood flow at the back of his neck. He had his hands flat against her back, and when the little bell sounded, he patted her shoulders and tried to step away. She laughed. “You’re so cute when you’re nervous,” she said. “I’ll see you at four-thirty.”

  “I have to go up to the school and see Mrs. D’Allessandro about Mitchell Brightman. Like we discussed.”

  She touched his cheek. “Anyone would think you were avoiding me, Walter. I’ll wait until tomorrow. Maybe I’ll drive to work again, so we won’t have to worry about the buses home. But call me tonight. And don’t forget to call Albert.” The doors closed on her.