Marson stared at her, then nodded.
She smiled and pulled a chair over and sat down. She had reddish-brown hair knotted tightly on top of her head and eyebrows that had been shaved and then painted on in a different arc. You could see where they should have been on her face, and the difference was disconcerting. “We heard about it, of course. We’re with the City Journal. I wondered if you’d want to talk to us.”
The two men walked over with their coffee. They were both thin, with boylike faces. The tall one had brown teeth. He was the one smiling.
“I don’t think I have time to talk just now,” Marson said to them. “Have you been in touch with these other people? The ones from the Post and NPR?”
“Well, we all got a press release, you know.”
The one with the brown teeth said, “Who you gonna vote for?”
After a pause, Marson said, “I don’t ever share that, sonny.”
The other man, who could not have been much beyond five feet tall, was florid faced, cheeks the color of a bruise, as if he were made up for some kind of stage role. He said, “The Republican candidate, I’ll bet, right?”
Marson stood, and reached out for Patrick. “Isn’t it time to go down to Schmidt’s room?”
Patrick was signing for the breakfast. Noreen walked over and said, “Excuse me, please—this is a private breakfast with my father. But I will tell you he’s a lifelong Democrat.”
Monica, still sitting with arms folded, said, quietly and evenly, “And fuck the Republican candidates. You can quote me.”
Robert Marson was taken aback. But he smiled. “My granddaughter, gentlemen.” Then he looked at the woman. “And lady.”
“She’s got quite a mouth on her, doesn’t she,” said the florid-faced man.
Monica said, “Oh, I do, don’t I? And you’re a little purple motherfucker.”
The three people simply stood there as Marson and his daughter and son and granddaughter left the restaurant. As they got into the elevator to go down, Noreen said, “Monica, that’s it, all right? None of that stuff with these people we’re going to see.”
“Sorry, Granddad,” Monica said.
“No need,” said Marson, remembering almost with embarrassment how he had felt when the men around him used that language during the war. “No worries,” he said to her.
“But not again,” said Noreen.
“I know the City Journal people, Mom. They have a big presence on Facebook. Jerks. Political trolls.” She took hold of Marson’s arm. “Believe me, Granddad. They’re a bunch of smug assholes.”
“Monica.”
“I’m with her,” Marson said, forcing a smile at Noreen. “Honor bright.”
VIII
In the thronged white hotel room with the paintings of stick figures in something burning on the walls, Marson, feeling hemmed in, offered to shake hands with Eugene Schmidt, who was seated between his grandson and a man in a powder-blue suit. Shaking hands seemed the logical thing to do in the circumstance, with everyone staring at them, and the camera rolling. Schmidt lifted his bony hand and let it be taken. “Old fighter,” Marson said to him, and evidently no one else heard it. Schmidt said, “Ja. Ve hef done ziss.”
“Speak louder,” Kaye said in a singsong tone, as if she didn’t really mean it.
Hans stood and guided the American around to sit next to his grandfather, who now looked confused and frightened. Everyone else was ranged against the opposite wall, where the writing desk and the telephone were. Kaye made a signal to Stuart and Brent, who moved closer and to one side, and then she stepped over to sit across from the two old men. Marson and Schmidt were sunk so far down in the oversoft couch, it appeared that neither of them would be able to rise on his own.
She said, “Can we have an embrace?”
Marson reached over and put his thin arms around the other man, and noted that he smelled strongly of coffee.
Neither of them spoke.
For Marson, the experience was strangely separate from him. It was as though he were observing everything from a great distance. He knew there had been the fact of being carried, wounded, half conscious to safety, and he was also aware of the immense good fortune that had been granted him; yet remembering it now felt like some kind of intellectual exercise. He did not quite believe it anymore.
Schmidt felt that the moment was clouded, dark, fraught with his awareness of how badly he had offended the other man with his wife, in the previous meeting. He was also inwardly cowering with the recollection of deciding to abandon his post and to help the wounded soldier, who was nothing to him but a way to survive, and not die. In truth he had never felt any pride in the thing, for all his talk of pride, for all his talk of the vision he had claimed about the lessons of mercy and being a good Catholic. None of it was true. As, in his teens, it hadn’t been true that he wanted to be a priest or even a librarian. He had once accepted his family’s happiness for him about the fact that he was even thinking of the priesthood. Knowing that people around him were aware of it made him special when he was young, though it was not something to talk about in the street or at school. He was a dreamy irresponsible boy who wanted to find a way not to work. But he was also the library student, and he had wept when they burned the books. He had been filled with terror when people began disappearing. Now these people and his grandson with his open innocent expression, staring at him, the man who saved one life as his last act in the war. They were all smiling at him, and Robert Marson was smiling, too. Marson, who must know what was at the bottom of his act. I hef hed enough. There was something morbid about all of it now.
At this age, there should be some clarity of emotion, some purity of feeling.
He looked into Marson’s narrow old eyes, saw the redness in the one on the right, the spot of blood there, and the lines and rucks and liver spots in the face, the patches of redness and dry skin on the bald pate, and murmured, “Forgive me.”
Kaye came close. “What did you say, Mr. Schmidt?”
They were adjusting the little microphone on Marson’s lapel, and Marson began suddenly to laugh. Children, he wanted to tell them. Go live your lives. But he kept nodding and laughing softly.
“Mr. Marson?” Kaye asked.
“I’m so glad to be alive,” he said to her. Then he took Schmidt’s hand and squeezed. “Look at my children and my granddaughter.” Patrick, with tears in his eyes, his arm around Noreen’s shoulder, brother with sister, and Monica standing close on the other side of her mother. None of whom would have been born. It was true. Nothing of the complications of things between Marson and his memory of Schmidt, or Schmidt and his troubles, whatever they were, meant anything next to that, and this was what Helen had known all along. They stood closer, Monica now also with her arm around her mother. A perfect picture. Hans Schmidt took the picture. Smalley, the journalist who felt wrong because he hadn’t gone to Iraq, also took a picture with his phone.
Schmidt had patted his shoulder and now sat back, and Kaye the NPR reporter looked into the camera and began to talk about two men and a fateful encounter seventy-two years ago in the terrible late winter of 1944. Then she stopped. “Hold that. I want to start with Eugene, okay? We’ll get his story first. Is that all right?”
Marson nodded. But it was Patrick and Stuart she was talking to.
“Let’s just get it done,” Smalley said.
“Then we’ll ask what it was for Mr. Marson—you know, so we see what the—what Mr. Schmidt was thinking and what Mr. Marson thought was going to happen.”
“All right,” Smalley said.
“Is that okay with you?” she asked Patrick.
“Well, but there’s the accent.”
“I think it’s charming.”
Patrick shrugged.
Addressing Stuart again, she said, “Are we ready?”
“Ready,” Stuart said. “Shite. We’ve been ready.”
And finally she turned to Schmidt. “So, Mr. Schmidt, more than seventy years ago you w
ere in a field near the Rapido Valley in Italy. Early March of 1944. The ongoing battle of Monte Cassino.”
Schmidt kept nodding as she spoke.
“Can you tell us what happened to you?”
Schmidt straightened slightly, put his terribly emaciated hands on his knees, glanced at Marson and all the others, and then with his thickly German accent, began to speak.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Bausch is the author of twelve novels and eight other volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of the REA Award for Short Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, and the Literature Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been featured in numerous best-of collections, including The O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. He is currently teaching in the writing program at Chapman University in Orange, California.
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Living in the Weather of the World Page 24