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

by Richard Bausch

  With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking his blessing and his help, but knowing that here on earth, God’s work must truly be our own.

  God’s work. Had this been a lie? If what Brightman had said was true, then wasn’t it a lie? Didn’t that fact make it all a lie?

  An anger was rising in him.

  On a night when there would have been school if there had been a school to go to, he went into a barbershop and asked the man to cut off all his hair.

  “Whadda ya want, kid? A flattop?” The barber was from New York, a middle-aged man with thick, black eyebrows and thick hair, dark Italian skin. What did he believe?

  “What did you think of Kennedy?” Marshall asked him.

  “That’s a funny question, kid. You just trying to make conversation with the barber?”

  “No—I want to know.”

  “Well, to tell you the troot, I never gave him much thought. Till he got shot. Then—I dunno. I guess he was okay. So how do you want this?”

  “Take it all,” Marshall told him. “A crew cut all the way.”

  “Not even sideburns, like Elvis dere?”

  “No sideburns.”

  At home, his mother stared at him in disbelief. “What in the world?”

  “I just got tired of worrying about it,” he said.

  “Are you all right, son?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Okay,” she said. “Forget it.”

  He had gone that first Monday after the fire to Natalie’s building, only to find that she had moved out. No one seemed to know where. When he spoke to Mrs. D’Allessandro over the telephone, she indicated that Natalie would be within reach soon enough—she used that phrase. He wanted to see her. He told Mrs. D’Allessandro this, and asked her to please relay the message. “Brightman is going ahead with the show,” he told her. “It won’t mess anything up to let me see Natalie.” He was amazed at his own harshness, speaking to her.

  “She doesn’t want to see anyone just now, all right?”

  He went to work each day, doing everything by a kind of rote, looking at everyone and wondering what they actually knew or believed. He kept to himself mostly, and in any case, Alice seemed to be avoiding him. At least during the first few days. What surprised him was that nothing, really, seemed to have changed. He walked the streets of the city and everything looked the same, people treated him basically the same, after remarking on the haircut, of course. But the world went on as before, and he himself ended up daydreaming about the presidency, about Kennedy, about the misty future. He took the comments of the others in the mailroom about his hair, and Mr. Wolfschmidt’s teasing. Mr. Wolfschmidt said he looked like those pictures of people in the freshly liberated concentration camps.

  When Alice did finally speak to him, she asked if this new look was the result of some religious feeling, some lacerating sense of penance for his sins, whatever they might be. She began to speculate, half teasingly, about this, and he cut her short.

  “I got a haircut,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fine,” she said, and turned to walk away.

  “Wait,” he said.

  They had been standing in the doorway of the mailroom. She had come down to deliver something for a mailing to the field representatives of the bureau.

  “Alice,” he said, “can’t we be like we were before?”

  “And how’s that?”

  “I don’t know—like it always was—”

  Her eyes were swimming. “You know, you look funny like that.”

  He said nothing.

  “Actually, it’s like there’s some aspect of self-mutilation about it. What’s with you, anyway, Walter?”

  “Nothing’s with me.”

  “I’ve decided something, Walter. I’m leaving here. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet, but I’m quitting. Maybe I’ll join the others—Stephen and Diane. There’ll be things for me to do. I’m going to make something good with my life. No matter what you or my father or anyone else says.”

  “Alice,” he said.

  “I’ve got work to do.” She turned and walked away.

  He followed her up the hall to the bank of elevators. She had pushed the UP button and was waiting, tapping her left foot, arms folded tight.

  “Alice,” he said. “I don’t want to lose you—” He stopped. He’d meant to go on and say “as a friend,” and had paused with the abrupt sensation that this was the most insulting thing he could say.

  She turned to him, and put one hand, gently, on his shoulder. “I feel the same, darling. Even with the haircut—I mean, I think it’s cute.”

  “No,” he said. “Not that. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Well, what then?” She stepped back. “Christ!”

  “I don’t think I’m ready to be married yet.”

  She let her arms drop to her sides.

  “Alice, look—”

  The elevator door opened with its dull metallic ding. She turned and got on. “I’m busy,” she said. “Really.”

  The doors closed.

  Later, out on the wintry streets of the city, he stopped in a recruitment office, a little cubicle on the same block with several travel agencies and savings banks, all in a row, as if there were some connection between them. The recruitment office was small and close, too well heated. There were pictures on the left wall of men in uniform—marines, sailors, airmen, soldiers. To the right were photos of ships in the middle of the ocean, the tremendous shimmer of the water under bright sun. The recruitment sergeant sat at a small metal desk with a portable fan on it, the fan rotating in a faltering, drunken nodding, troubling the air without quite stirring it enough to cause a breeze. The door into the back room, where other desks were ranged like a small schoolroom, was propped open with a big book. He pointed at it when Marshall sat down.

  “Know what that is?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s the Oxford English Dictionary.”

  “Really.” The young man looked at it. “Interesting.”

  “I do crossword puzzles. You do crossword puzzles?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I read books. Fifty a year. I keep track. Write them all down. Title and author. People think the services are dumb. It’s not so. I know career army guys who’ve read Shakespeare. You can act Shakespeare on army bases. Saw a very good production at Fort Myer not too long ago. You know Shakespeare, right? You look like an intelligent young man.”

  “I read Macbeth, in high school.”

  “Good, huh?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I know that play, see. And the others, too. Well, some of them.” The sergeant was thin, balding, with green eyes and a reddish cast to his skin. He had magazines and newspapers in a stack on one side of the desk, and books on a shelf behind him. On the wall there, set on either side of the shelf, were photographs of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The photo of Kennedy was draped in black cloth. “So,” the sergeant said. “What can we do for you?”

  Marshall had walked in here on an impulse. He said, “What does a person have to do to enlist in the army?”

  “That’s easy as pie. Have you ever been convicted of a felony?”

  “No, sir.”

  The sergeant smiled. “Nothing to it.” Then he laughed. “Hell, you won’t even have to get the haircut. You’re halfway there.”

  “Thank you,” Marshall said and got up to leave.

  “Hey, where you going?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Want some literature?”

  Marshall hesitated a moment. “Not now,” he said. “Maybe later.”

  It was a dry, windless, cold afternoon. He went up to Saint Matthew’s, and in, walked to the communion rail and knelt down. The smell of votive candles came to him, agitated in their blue cups with every current in the air. He looked at the crucifix and tried hard to pray, but the word
s simply wouldn’t attach themselves to their own meanings. Finally, he walked around to the rectory to see if he could talk to Father Soberg, but Father Soberg was gone, had left earlier in the week for Southeast Asia. A young curate said this, and asked if Marshall wanted to write down the name of the place where Father Soberg would be. Marshall said he would remember it. “All right,” the curate told him, apparently annoyed with him for not wanting to write it down, “His new assignment is in a place called Saigon. In French Indochina, though I think it has another name now.”

  “Vietnam,” Marshall told him.

  “I try to avoid the news when I can. I’m so out of touch with all that sort of thing.”

  “Thank you,” Marshall said.

  At the end of the week, when he drove into town for the appointment with the D’Allessandros, he half expected to find Natalie there. He stopped at Albert’s building, and went through Albert’s simple astonishment at his appearance. “Is this—religious or something?”

  “No, Albert, it’s not religious.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What is it?” Emma said.

  “You should see Walter’s hair.”

  She moved confidently in the room, like a sighted person, crossing to where Marshall stood. With the same confidence, she raised her arms and put her hands on top of his head. “Ohh!”

  “Something, isn’t it?” Albert said.

  “My, my.” She brought her hands down, but remained where she was. “What happened to you?”

  “I got a haircut,” Marshall said. “That’s all.”

  “Well, didn’t you indeed.”

  “Look, I’d rather not talk about it, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “Okay.” She went back to where she had been sitting, and took her place, reaching for the tea she’d been drinking.

  “I don’t know how long we’ll be,” Albert said to her.

  “Okay.”

  They went out into the windy dusk. The sky was red in the west, with flaming shards of cloud in it, and to the north the moon, white and flat as a button, had risen above the level of the trees. Most of the leaves were gone now, and the wind kicked them up from the sidewalk and the street.

  “Emma seems—happy,” Marshall said.

  “We’re happy enough.”

  They got into the Lark. Albert had to put his knees against the dashboard. “The thing is,” he said, “you have to get on with living, you know?”

  Marshall started the car and pulled out toward Connecticut Avenue.

  “We went on over to Maryland and got married, last Tuesday.”

  “You did?”

  Albert was staring out the window. “I guess, finally, it doesn’t really matter what she thinks. She doesn’t have any political power, you know? She’s a nice person. She’ll learn. She wants to do well. I thought she did fine at that dinner for Minnie. Maybe we’ve all got to start trying to forgive each other a little.”

  “That Mitchell Brightman—he’s—bad,” Marshall said. “Bad.”

  “Well. Just seemed like a guy with a booze problem to me. He sure gave poor Atwater hell. Or Toynbee.”

  They both laughed, and Marshall felt the surprise of having allowed himself the luxury. “I’ve been really messed up lately,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “I don’t mean about Alice and Natalie.”

  Albert looked at him. “There’s something else?”

  “Never mind,” Marshall told him.

  “No, tell me.”

  “He—he said some things about Kennedy.”

  “I thought they were friends.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Albert.”

  The D’Allessandros’ house was on Porter Street, just down from Wisconsin Avenue, tucked in among automobile-sized shrubs and tall hedges, shaded by old oaks and massive willows. The house was a big, dark Victorian with a wide front porch and awninged windows. Ricky Dalmas and Joe Baker were already going up the steps; Wilbur Soames was waiting for them, saying something with a smile that Joe Baker laughed at. Marshall parked the car, and then he and Albert made their way across the sidewalk and the lawn, walking slowly because Albert was having trouble seeing the ground. Marshall looked at the windows, for Natalie. The thought of her was strangely divorced from him, like a memory he couldn’t be certain of.

  “Alice is quitting her job,” he told Albert. “Going away.”

  “So the marriage is off?”

  “It’s off, all right.”

  “What about the other girl—Natalie?”

  “I guess it’s off with her, too.”

  “So you’re a free man again.”

  They were almost to the porch steps, and Wilbur Soames had heard this last. “Man,” he said, smiling broadly. “How’s it feel to be a free man?”

  Marshall gave no answer to this. In the doorway of the house, Natalie stood, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. Her hair was pulled back in a French twist, and her skin was several shades darker. He had never seen any woman—not in magazines or movies or television or in all the streets he had ever walked—so beautiful. She offered him her hand, palm down, as though she expected him to kiss it. He took it and stepped through the doorway, into the brown foyer of the D’Allessandros’ house.

  “I had a vacation,” she told him, and though she did not whisper, there was something confiding about it; she was talking only to him. “Key West.”

  He was speechless. He thought of her on a beach, in sunlight, at the edge of the sea.

  “And you,” she said, taking a step back to gaze at him. “You had a fanatical barber, didn’t you?”

  “Are you living here now?” he asked.

  “What did you do with your hair?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.”

  The others were all gathering in the living room, which was to the right of the foyer—a small room crowded with overstuffed chairs, potted plants, and tables stacked with books. There were bookcases lining the walls and flanking the fireplace, where a small plume of fire danced atop a single log. In the room were the D’Allessandros, Albert, Ricky Dalmas, Wilbur Soames, Joe Baker, Martin Alvarez, and Mrs. Gordon, who was watching Marshall, keeping herself back in among the shadows in that corner of the room.

  “We’re going to see if we can’t continue the school,” Mr. D’Allessandro said. “It’s worth a try, anyway.” He looked at Marshall, and then looked again. Marshall thought it was his hair, but then there was movement behind him and he turned to see Marcus, in a white trench coat and wearing a white hat, entering the foyer. Behind him was a big man with heavy features—thick, drooping jaws, swollen-looking brows, a bulbous red nose, and a pursed, full-lipped mouth. The man looked at each of the people in the living room, edging Marcus aside to enter. The expression on his face was pinched somehow, as though there were something sour on his tongue.

  “This,” said Mrs. D’Allessandro, “is Terrence.”

  “Mr. Brace to you,” Marcus said.

  The big man, without turning to him, said, “Shut up, Marcus.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Shut that up, too.” The big man crossed the room and turned at the mantel, where he took a cigarette case out of his coat, opened it, extracted a cigarette, then snapped it closed. It shone in the light there, gold; clearly it was something he liked people to see. He took his time putting it back, then brought out a lighter of the same gold hue and lighted the cigarette. Mr. D’Allessandro was watching him, his face pulled back in that grimacing smile.

  “What’s he doing here, then?” The big man gestured at Wilbur. His accent was a tiny increment less pronounced than Mrs. D’Allessandro’s.

  “He’s a student,” she said. “Like the others.”

  He blew smoke, then turned to her. “Really.”

  “Yes, really.”

  He drew on the cigarette. “Well, we’re an advanced sort, aren’t we?”

  No one said anything.

  Natalie stood a little clo
ser to Marshall; it was almost a cowering. Marshall reached over and took her hand, but she gently removed it.

  “We were meeting to discuss continuing the school,” said Mr. D’Allessandro.

  “Shut up, Lawrence. You’re a brother-in-law, not a partner.”

  Marcus said, “It’s time for a little justice.”

  The big man pointed at him. “You shut up, Marcus.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You always have to get the last word in. Shut up.” He smoked the cigarette, looking at them one by one. “There’s been some talk about the fire. I want everybody to understand the fire was an accident.”

  “That’s the official ruling on it,” Marcus said. “From the police.”

  The big man took a step toward Marcus. “Go outside and wait on the porch.”

  “It’s cold, Mr. Brace.”

  “You, with the haircut,” Terrence said, indicating Marshall. “If he says another bleeding word, you have my humble permission to strike him over the head.”

  “Oh, Terrence,” said Mrs. D’Allessandro. “Do get on with it.”

  He took another long draw on the cigarette, blew the smoke, then stepped back to the mantel. “We’ve decided that the school should be kept going—the radio school, anyway—and since the insurance money from the fire will more than cover outstanding debts, we shall be investing in new equipment and a new place. Mr. D’Allessandro will administer the classes only. Only that.” He bowed in Mr. D’Allessandro’s direction. “And we’ll handle the—finances. There will be no return of tuition because classes will resume within the next week or two. The program involving Mr. Brightman will go on as planned. We’ll start back a week earlier in January, and graduation will be in July rather than June. Are there any questions?”

  “I won’t be continuing,” Albert said kindly.

  “You won’t get your tuition back,” said Terrence.

  “I understand that.”

  Marshall, to his own surprise, spoke up, too. “I won’t be continuing, either.”

  “What is this?” Mr. D’Allessandro said. “You went through all that trouble to help us.” He turned to his wife. “Kid went through all that trouble to help us—”