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

by Richard Bausch

  She moved to the table, put the grapefruit down, then looked at him. “Honey, please don’t.”

  “There’s other jobs—” he began.

  She waved this away. “Don’t be ridiculous. I can’t imagine what you’re talking about. I like the job I have. Now please—”

  He felt rooted to the spot.

  “Walter, you’re gonna be late. And you’re gonna make me late. Please, son.”

  He worked the collator all morning while Mr. Wolfschmidt went over some drawings, lovely, delicate, brown-shaded pictures of cathedral spires and buttresses and statuary that his small, gray, architect father had brought in. The drawings were done on large pieces of heavy paper the size of posters. The old man stood by, proudly watching, as Mr. Wolfschmidt lifted each unwieldy page and put it gingerly facedown, revealing the next page, the next drawing. They were as exact as pale photographs; even the texture of the carved stone had been rendered with meticulous care. The old man wanted to mail them, and he was evidently asking for his son’s expertise. Mr. Wolfschmidt began preparing the drawings for mailing overseas, using materials from the shelves, and occasionally sending to the stockroom for more. This became a daylong project, since the old man wanted the drawings sent flat, not rolled, as he must have sent all his drawings in the past. Before the workday was over, everyone in the mailroom had contributed to the project—offering advice, fetching tape and cardboard to brace things, holding the ends of the packages while Mr. Wolfschmidt taped them.

  Alice hadn’t come to work again, and there was no answer when Marshall tried to call her, shortly after noon. He left work early—Mr. Wolfschmidt and the old man had taken the clumsy packages on to the post office building, and there wasn’t anything else to do, really. He made his way gradually to Pennsylvania Avenue, stopping to look in the windows of the travel bureaus—there were four of them within two blocks along Fifteenth Street—with their life-sized, vivid pictures of faraway places, exotic destinations whose commonest link, other than the overly bright colors, seemed to be the beauty and youth of the people doing the traveling. The lithe, bathing-suited bodies of the tanned women in these pictures provided an allure that weakened his resolve, finally, and caused him no small amount of discomfort. Yet he couldn’t keep from pausing to stare at these lush, extravagant portrayals of distance…

  He was beginning to think of how it might answer things to remove himself for a time.

  He walked across Lafayette Square, with its spotted, colorful shade in the late sun, its drifting yellow and burned red leaves, strolling couples, and lone, hurrying passersby. He thought about the night he had walked there with Alice, the night he had gotten his pocket picked by some indigent named Walter Winchell, and had asked her to marry him. It seemed an age ago, and it wasn’t even three weeks. At the edge of the park, he turned and looked at the White House, in its vivid green surround, and had a moment’s faltering sense of just how farfetched his own plans were—that he could ever live there, or find anything to do there, really.

  The city was alive with sirens. Bells. Horns. He walked up Sixteenth, past the AFL-CIO and the Lafayette Hotel, and at K Street he saw four big fire engines go by, heading toward the sunny west. The sun was blinding in the windows of the buildings there. He went on up K Street, to Eighteenth, and turned north, toward Wheaton’s. He was hungry. A camera shop on the corner had placed a new picture of Kennedy in the window: It was a formal portrait, bordered in black, and beneath it were the words of his inaugural address.

  Let the word go forth, from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans

  He might’ve read the whole speech again, gone back to the beginning and read it through, playing the voice in his head, but the commotion of the engines in the street behind him brought him to himself. A hook and ladder came blaring to Eighteenth and roared past him, heading north. He had gone only a few paces when he saw, beyond the trees lining the street ahead, a billowing cloud of black smoke. The whole sky there was being swallowed by it, the black edges crowding upward, spreading, hurrying on, a prodigious rushing away of dark folds. People were running along the sidewalk, and he fell in with them, realizing as he came past the corner with the dark-red, massive shape of Saint Matthew’s to his right that it was the D’Allessandro School building that was the source of the alarm and the smoke. He had been running, but now he slowed, moving through the throng of onlookers to stand on the other side of the street from the building, with its library window and its staircase, its gray, stern look, pouring smoke from the roof and the upstairs windows. Two engines had already started sending their wide, solid spray of water at the fiercest part of the blaze, just above the front entrance. There were more sirens, and police.

  The young man moved amid the crowd, looking for a recognizable face. He found Ricky Dalmas, Joe Baker, and Wilbur Soames standing near the bus stop on the corner. Albert Waple was just beyond them, watching the building, squinting at it, one hand visored over his eyes. Marshall walked up to him. Albert turned to him and shrugged.

  “How long have you been here?” Marshall asked him.

  “A while.”

  They moved back a little, and Albert leaned against a black wrought-iron fence that lined the sidewalk.

  “Was anybody in the building?” Marshall asked.

  “There’s nobody.”

  Joe Baker saw them and sidled over. “Well, that’s that, I guess.”

  “Anybody know how it happened?” Albert wanted to know.

  “Bet money on it—D’Allessandro started it.”

  Wilbur Soames and Ricky Dalmas stepped close, having heard this last. “You really think so?” Soames said.

  “It makes perfect sense to me. I bet the building’s insured for a ton of money.”

  They watched as the cascading spray of water seemed to disappear without effect into the flaming creases of smoke. A moment later, the D’Allessandros’ battered little car pulled up. Mr. D’Allessandro got out on the passenger side, and ran into the middle of the fire engines and firemen, waving his arms and shouting something. Mrs. D’Allessandro got out of the car and simply watched.

  “He doesn’t look like he knew about it,” Wilbur Soames said.

  “What’re you-all looking at?” said Albert.

  Mrs. D’Allessandro had seen them now, and had left the car, walking toward them while still attending to the burning building. She looked pale, shaken. Her eyes were very wide.

  “Did you—” she began, talking to Marshall.

  “I just got here,” he said.

  She turned and watched it with them for a time. No one said anything. There were shouts among the firemen, and inside the building something big collapsed, with a tremendous shuddering groan. Flames licked out of the windows of the lower floors. Mr. D’Allessandro came limping out of the circle of engines, heading toward the car. He saw his wife standing on the other side of the street, and made his way to her, his face fixed in its grimace, not smiling now. He turned at her side, and she put one arm around his middle. “I don’t understand,” he said. He had to shout to be heard over the sound of more sirens, and so Marshall heard it, too. “I had it all worked out. He knew I had it worked out.”

  She said something to him that was lost in the noise, and he glanced over her shoulder at Marshall and the others. He signaled for Marshall to approach.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nothing’s changed.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “We’ve got the church,” Mr. D’Allessandro said. “We can still do it. Brightman can still come do his program.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “This doesn’t change anything.”

  His wife turned and leaned in to speak to him. “Lawrence, it’s over. They’ve done it to you anyway, don’t you see?”

  “It is not over,” he said angrily.

  She glanced at Marshall, then turned away.

  “Keep it in mind,” Mr. D’Allessandro sa
id.

  “What about us, sir?” Ricky Dalmas said.

  Mr. D’Allessandro looked at him. Daylight was failing now, though there was a smoldering illumination and haze coming from the fire. “We’ll finish the year in the church basement if we have to.”

  His wife said, “What’ll you do for equipment?”

  “We’ll work something out,” Mr. D’Allessandro said.

  “That’s what you always say,” she told him. Then she stepped out into the street and peered along the wall of people; she had seen someone. She went a few paces in that direction, then turned and came back, facing her husband. “I don’t even have to ask it, do I? How long ago did you do it?”

  “Esther, please.”

  “I saw him, Lawrence! I saw Marcus just now.”

  “That’s enough,” Mr. D’Allessandro said.

  But she shook him. “You gave it to him, didn’t you? Terrence—you deeded it over to him. What did they have over you to make you let them have the deed?”

  He took her by the elbow, and guided her back across the street. The light there was ghostly, a strange mixture of flame-glow and failing sun. They argued, or she railed and he tried to calm her.

  “What was that all about?” Albert asked, putting one hand on Marshall’s shoulder.

  “I think Mr. D’Allessandro made some arrangements of his own,” Marshall said.

  The others—Baker and Soames and Dalmas—were a few feet away, talking to Martin Alvarez, who had just arrived. “Well,” Joe Baker said, looking around at everyone, “I guess school is really out, now.”

  Marshall thought of walking up to Natalie’s building, and he looked for her among the many faces gathered in the unreal glow of the flames. At last he walked with Albert to his apartment, thinking about getting on a bus home. The fire, the harsh, obliterating crackle and roar of it, had upset him, and made him strangely aware of the ongoing pathology of the city. He wanted to get home, and Albert very much wanted him to stay for a drink.

  “How’re things with Emma?” Marshall asked him.

  “Swimming.”

  Marshall didn’t pursue this. They came to Albert’s building, and turned to look at the awful light beyond the trees.

  “I wasn’t cut out for radio,” Albert said.

  “What’ll you do now?”

  “I don’t know.” Albert sighed. “Go blind, I guess.” This was spoken in a tone of surrender.

  “I mean—for a career.”

  “I’ve got a job. I’ll just keep it. Till I can’t see anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” Marshall said.

  “Come on,” said Albert.

  They went up the walk, onto the little porch. Emma was sitting with her back to them in the lighted window. Albert’s entry startled her. She stood. “What is it?”

  Albert told her what had happened, and she began to cry. She put her arms around him, sobbing.

  “I heard all the sirens and smelled the smoke, too. I’m so sorry, Albert.”

  He said, “I’ve got Walter with me.”

  “No one was hurt or anything?”

  “No.”

  “I heard the sirens. I’m so sorry, Albert. I know how much it meant to you.”

  He gave Marshall a look, as if to ask for his tolerance.

  “I mean I know you were discouraged…” She halted. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say.

  “I should go,” Marshall said gently.

  But they wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted to talk about the school, the fire, the things Albert had heard Mrs. D’Allessandro say. Marshall decided against saying what he thought he knew, that Marcus had used something of D’Allessandro’s complications with Mrs. Gordon to convince him to give the school to Mr. Brace, or Terrence, or whatever his name was. It would be gossip to say anything, but it seemed perfectly clear as an assumption.

  Albert made tea, and they listened to the news on his little transistor radio, the reedy, singsong voice of a disk jockey reporting that the fire had burned out of control for two hours now, and that the building was lost. No one had been inside; there were no serious injuries. Two firemen had been overcome by smoke, and one had suffered a minor abrasion from falling debris. Albert turned the radio off, and after a silence, Emma said, “He didn’t sound a bit better than you do, Albert.”

  Albert sipped his tea and seemed to ruminate.

  “Well,” Emma muttered, “he didn’t.”

  It was a strange hour. And when at last Marshall could extricate himself, Emma insisted on walking out to the street with them. “I smell the smoke,” she said. In the dim light her pale eyes looked like drops of clear water, and there was an almost childlike aspect to her face, turned toward the sound of the fire engines four blocks away. Marshall’s heart went out to her, for the fear and uncertainty he saw in her face.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said. “I just know it is.”

  Albert put his arm around her, and squeezed gently, held her to him. “I guess we’ll both see you tomorrow night,” he said. “At Alice’s.”

  “’Bye,” Marshall said.

  At the end of the block, he looked back; they were just turning to go up to the open doorway of the building. They walked arm in arm, and seemed to be leaning on each other for comfort.

  Chapter 18

  Never let anyone underestimate,” Mitchell Brightman said, standing at his end of the table, “the power of the human species for cooperation.”

  “Sit down, Mitch,” said Alice’s father. “You’ve had too much wine.”

  “Wait,” Mitchell Brightman said, “I’m serious. Defoliate a forest. Build a road. Cure a disease. Elect a president. Fight a goddamn war. Make a whole country change itself almost overnight—it all stems from one thing. Cooperation. An insignificant Negro woman decides she’s tired of sitting in the back of the bus, and that gets it started. In six weeks there’s a boycott of all the forms of transportation in the city, and an entire system is rocked to its very foundation. And how does this happen? Cooperation. That’s our triumph, and our tragedy.”

  “Mitch, for God’s sake.”

  “Let me finish, Patrick. I’m going somewhere with this—”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  “No, really now. Think of it. I ask you all, humbly, to think of the possibilities for goodness and evil in that one shining fact. You think Hitler could’ve succeeded without the cooperation of a whole lot of well-meaning people, good ol’ day-to-day, work-a-daddy Germans just doing their jobs, trying not to make trouble for themselves or their loved ones, concentrating on the goal without ever really thinking about what the goal was? Think the Civil War could’ve happened? Think Lincoln could’ve freed the slaves? It’s all part of the human habit of, and need for, cooperation. You think we could drop those bombs on Hanoi Harbor without cooperation? Think of those Russian technicians in Cuba, working like hell together for life and family, building those missiles, and all the cooperation that went into discovering they were there and then getting them out of there, everybody cooperating. Think of building a bomb that could blow up the whole damn world. We did that. Human beings did that. But we also cured polio, and smallpox, and diphtheria. We built this city. And the roads, and Hoover Dam, and we put a man into space.”

  “Very good, Mitch. Thank you. That’s enough, now.”

  “Excuse me a second,” Mr. Brightman said and hurried out of the room.

  “I’m afraid I need your tolerance,” Alice’s father said, looking down the table. “My—uh—colleague’s a bit under the weather.” No one answered him. Things had been discomfiting for a time now, since the serving of the food was delayed: some problem in the kitchen, and Minnie had wanted to go in there to see what she could do. Mr. Kane wouldn’t let her, and called for more wine. A mistake. They had all watched Mitchell Brightman emptying his glass and filling it and emptying it again. There was very little talk, and then Alice’s father stood and gave a speech about being thankful for the return to he
alth of his dear friend and employee, Minnie Jackson (it had struck Marshall as odd that this was the first time he’d heard Minnie’s last name). Minnie sat at the other end of the table, opposite Mr. Kane. She wore a white blouse with frills down the front, and a lovely corsage that Alice had bought her. She had gone to the beauty parlor and gotten her hair done in a tight perm, and she looked, Alice said, so much younger. It was true. She seemed almost girlish. And until the trouble developed in the kitchen, she accepted all the service offered her by the other employees of Patrick Kane as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Alice, who had expressed the worry that the novelty of the situation might make Minnie nervous or uncomfortable, was very pleased.

  She sat to her father’s right, just down from the head of the table, across from Mitchell Brightman. Ranged opposite each other, going down the table, were Marshall and his mother, Albert and Clark Atwater, Emma and a member of Minnie’s church—Mrs. Westerbrook, who was eighty-one and as small and dark as the window, with wide, watery black eyes and a high, soft, lovely laugh that issued forth nervously at nearly everything. After Mr. Kane’s speech, the sense of relief seemed almost palpable in the room. Everyone began chattering at once. Mrs. Westerbrook and Albert talked quite good-naturedly to each other about their failing eyesight. Emma, following them, was animated, going on about learning Braille and how it had opened up the world to her. Mr. Kane and Alice talked about Woody Guthrie while Mitchell Brightman, lost in some contemplative reverie, drank still more wine. The fragrances from the kitchen wafted in to them all. Bread was served, and bowls of fruit, a plate of crackers and cheese. Brightman kept pouring wine for himself, and then asking for more, and then he and Alice’s father were carrying on a heated discussion about tactics the Johnson campaign was using against Goldwater—a commercial in which a little girl picking flowers and singing softly to herself is interrupted by a nuclear explosion. “It’s perfect,” Mr. Kane said. “It gets the point across without the use of a single word.”

  “It’s reprehensible,” said Brightman, drinking the wine, “and you know it.”