The Stories of Frederick Busch Read online

  THE STORIES OF

  FREDERICK

  BUSCH

  EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

  ELIZABETH STROUT

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  New York London

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  INTRODUCTION

  HARDWATER COUNTRY (1974, 1979)

  WIDOW WATER

  THE LESSON OF THE HÔTEL LOTTI

  FAMILY CIRCLE

  WHAT YOU MIGHT AS WELL CALL LOVE

  TOO LATE AMERICAN BOYHOOD BLUES (1984)

  THE SETTLEMENT OF MARS

  RISE AND FALL

  ABSENT FRIENDS (1985)

  RALPH THE DUCK

  ORBITS

  NAKED

  DOG SONG

  RERUNS

  NAME THE NAME

  TO THE HOOP

  THE CHILDREN IN THE WOODS (1994)

  DREAM ABUSE

  THE PAGE

  DON’T TELL ANYONE (2000)

  HEADS

  BOB’S YOUR UNCLE

  JOY OF COOKING

  THE NINTH, IN E MINOR

  VESPERS

  TIMBERLINE

  STILL THE SAME OLD STORY

  ARE WE PLEASING YOU TONIGHT?

  THE BABY IN THE BOX

  DOMICILE

  RESCUE MISSIONS (2006)

  GOOD TO GO

  THE SMALL SALVATION

  THE BOTTOM OF THE GLASS

  METAL FATIGUE

  PATROLS

  COPYRIGHT

  ALSO BY FREDERICK BUSCH

  INTRODUCTION

  “Be brave,” Frederick Busch admonished aspiring writers in an interview he gave in 2003. “Keep your knees unbent.” Courage on the page mattered to this writer, and those reading through this collection of stories will find Busch’s writing to be relentlessly brave. “Love and serve your characters,” he said in the same interview. That will be found here, too, how he loved his characters and served them well. The undercurrent of tenderness toward these characters, combined with the daring presentation of them in their stripped down struggles, is what makes a Busch story its own inimitable experience to read. At the time of his death at the age of sixty-four, Frederick Busch had written twenty-seven books; seven of them were story collections. While he was a prize-winning novelist, the stories here have been chosen as a collection that represents the span of his life spent as a short story writer. This career began, he was to famously say, in the fourth grade when his stony-faced teacher suddenly smiled at him after he wrote a poem that pleased her. He claimed to have written steadily since then. But it would be a mistake to assume that Busch spent a lifetime as a writer in order for the world to smile upon him. These are not stories about a flowering dog wood tree, as his fourth grade poem had been. These stories are intended for the brave reader. These are stories for grown-ups.

  Born in Brooklyn, New York, Busch spent the majority of his adult years living in central New York State. Much of his work portrays the landscape of this rural and rugged and often bleak, often beautiful, terrain. There are other stories here—though they are fewer in number—that reflect his childhood spent in the Midwood and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn, where his father was a lawyer and his mother a teacher. Certain themes naturally arise when one reads the work of a writer, and readers of Busch will see the recurrence of the man who is openly truculent, often self-lacerating, always aware of his failings. Busch, who cited Hemingway as one of his influences, also cites Hemingway’s phrase “It’s that some of them stay little boys so long ..... the great American boy-men,” as an epigraph in the beginning of one of his collections, and it is no surprise. Busch’s men are often boy-men: men trying to be adults, trying to be good, and always, or often, it seems, falling short. They are men struggling to get the upper hand against their recalcitrant boy-part, that part that still views the world with bafflement in spite of their experience. It is their awareness of this aspect of themselves—and Busch’s awareness—that gives a particular type of sufficiency and fullness to his stories.

  It also makes the women who love these men despair. The women found here are a varied lot, but they are fundamentally good. No one can accuse Busch of not liking his women. You can feel his sympathy for them as their husbands, ex-husbands, boyfriends, make them weep, make them yell, or cause them to walk out. While there may be the inattentive mother, the straying wife—more apt to be found in the Brooklyn stories—by and large the women in these stories love their men. If a boy-man survives his poor actions, it is often because of a woman’s love. More often than not it is a woman keeping the children cared for, and if the husband or boyfriend at times seems like another needful child, Busch portrays this need with clear eyes.

  THE FIRST LINE of the first story in this collection is a fairly direct route to the Busch world view. “What to know about pain is how little we deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose.” There is no summing up of Busch’s work, but these lines serve to open the causeway the reader will find himself riding across. These stories abound with pain undeserved—parents who have lost children through death or mental illness, children who have suffered the neglect, not always benign, of adults pursuing their own needs rapaciously—and these stories are filled, too, with the understanding that pain is hard to lose. But what Busch does especially well is to tell stories of how simple pain is to give. Because he writes with a large heart, the only judgment present comes from the characters themselves, certainly not from the writer. In his display of how easy it is to hurt another, we find that undercurrent of tenderness; Busch is not condemning. He—in his authorial role—seems as bewildered by all this as anyone. No one, the subtext of this voice might be saying, starts out life with the desire to cause anyone pain. And yet we hurt people all the time. The mere act of living, Busch seems to imply, means that this will be true.

  Perhaps it is one reason that dogs appear so frequently in these pages. The black labs, and yellow labs, and big shaggy Newfoundlands inhabiting these rural settings are not hurting anyone. They are pure in their innocence, pure in their loyalty. They are not complicated, they are just good, although, Busch’s world being what it is, people are not always good to them. In the story “Dog Songs” there are twenty-six dogs living in a yellow trailer; they come to a bad end at the hand of the town deputy who fears they may have been perverted by their owners, one of whom is hoping for a sex change. The opposite is true, of course, the love these dogs have for mankind is never ending. Through the eyes of the protagonist, a judge lying in a hospital bed after driving—perhaps suicidal, he cannot remember—into a tree with a woman other than his wife, dwells on the image of these dogs which had earlier been destroyed. “He thought, when he thought of the dogs, that their lips and tails and even their postures signaled their devotion...... And as the deputies flung them .... and their bodies flew, they looked ardent.” Even in death, the innocence of these dogs is excruciating. They are the angels in the Busch universe.

  The heroes are those people just trying to do their best, and you will find a lot of them here. One of his better known stories, “Ralph the Duck,” starts with a dog vomiting early in the morning. A wife is sleeping on the couch. The husband, a security guard at the local college, is determined to make her coffee when she wakes, determined to behave in a way that will cause her to forgive whatever he has done to hurt her the day before. But first the dog has to be let out, and let back in. The dog is interested in a dead deer carcass in the woods, and the protagonist man, a first person narrator, knows the dog will return to the carcass. “He loved what made him sick.” The dog is not the only one, and undoubtedly this is the point.
The college girl loves her professor who has discarded her; she’s taken pills, making herself very sick. The protagonist must save her, and presumably he does. But he is sick with fury in doing so, and we learn why by the time the story concludes. The wife, patient in her own grief, is willing to endure her husband’s behavior; she is the adult here, the unconditional giver of love, though one assumes at times she is just as sick of it all as anyone else, and takes a night’s respite on the couch. Still, they endure. They endure, this couple, as do many couples in the book, and sometimes we are given to believe that is enough. Other times a relationship does not endure, and Busch is not afraid to let us know that the pain we so easily inflict, that is not so easily removed, will lead us to our ultimate destination: that of being alone.

  Busch was writing many of these stories during a time when it was fashionable for short stories to be what was referred to as minimalist. He was, after all, a contemporary of Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, Ann Beattie, Richard Bausch, and others, who were also writing in the vein of a short story form that was pared down, plain-spoken, often first-person, and told of single-event moments in what we call ordinary life. It is natural that Busch would write stories reflecting his time in history, and he did, all the while looking back over his shoulder, as any writer does, at those he believed helped shape his own particular use of the American language. In his case, these influences were, in particular, Melville and Hemingway. But he would just as naturally have been influenced by those writing next to him. And of course being a minimalist in the story form meant just that: the form was kept to a minimum. In the case of Busch, the stories mostly dwell on the domestic.

  Even in the story “Reruns” where a wife has left her psychiatrist husband, and gone to Beruit, where she is kidnapped and taken hostage, the story remains tightly oriented in the town of Sherwood New York, not particularly interested in the international aspects of the world. The husband himself realizes, “We are so far from every place.” Later he reports, “I couldn’t have named one hostage.” His life is taking place in the town with three traffic lights; his life is taking place inside his office where he admits, “Being crazy’s a family project,” and inside his house where a member of the state department sits in the kitchen, and in the next room the daughters watch their mother on television.

  So-called ordinary life, though, is large, and the array of situations and conflicts presented in these stories is impressive. Again and again we are reminded that we have no idea what goes on behind closed doors, or what goes on in the mind of another. Busch once said that what he most enjoyed as a writer was “knowing that I made someone see something in a different way.” It’s hard to imagine any reader of these stories driving past a farmhouse in upstate New York—or anywhere—without seeing it another way, which is to say honoring the possibilities that lie inside, those aspects of life that are unsayable, otherwise unknowable.

  In “Name the Name” a man who is a traveling teacher, required by the state to attend to local school age children who for whatever reasons cannot make it to the classroom, takes us through an ordinary (extraordinary) day. First he goes to the home of a young pregnant girl, whose mother makes him reheated coffee, “a woman too embarrassed to look at my face. She wore polyester pants with a black and white check, a man’s gray sweatshirt over a heavy flannel shirt, and big slippers lined with synthetic fur; on top of each slipper was the face of a dog with a pink tongue. She wore no socks and the chapped red roughness of her ankles was an intimacy between us.” From there the teacher goes to the hospital to teach a bedridden girl poetry that she writes on her chalkboard is “bologna.” And he finishes his day by going to the county jail where the sixteen year old young man he is there to teach is his own son. While there was a flirtation with a nurse at the hospital, as there are often flirtations or hints of sexual liaisons outside the family, it seems the family unit is the engine running most of these stories, with the boy-man head of the household often weary.

  It can be argued—and Busch seems both aware of this and in charge of it—that the claustrophobic self-loathing of these men comes close at times to narcissism; a fascination with the self that can’t transcend its setting. This is when the Brooklyn based stories provide a change of tone as well as their change in location. You will find Brooklyn trees seen through Brooklyn windows, men wearing polished wing tips, cigarettes smoked while holding glasses of brandy, and the sound of Electrolux vacuum cleaners. The men seem more cheerful, in spite of their heart conditions, or the wives they betray, or the lovers whose needs they cannot fulfill. Probably this comes from the fact that these stories tend to be narrated by a younger character, looking up at these people as a young person often does, believing that grown-ups are actually adults. The boy-man aspect is in abeyance. They tell the tale of a time gone by.

  And eventually the other stories will do the same. The era that Busch writes of is, of course, passing. He noted this himself in an essay he wrote in 1984, “Fiction That’s Glossier,” bemoaning what he found in the fiction section of what was then the current magazines. He found gossip instead of beauty. He found technology instead of narrative. He found stories that merely stated problems, working “like a small machine of limited function.” He worried that the “new anti-Freudian psychopiddle that began in the 60’s and flourished during the 70’s, when it was stylish to be selfish, healthy, pretty and pretty much alone in your concerns” was now all the readers wanted. What Busch wanted was to communicate. This is why he praised Hemingway for “responsible writing, a writing that is about the essential transaction between writer and reader. It is about being human in a time of despair.”

  Busch has been referred to as a “writer’s writer,” and it is hard to know exactly what this means. Ostensibly it means that he is read mainly by writers—and for good reason; one can learn a lot about dialogue, character, setting, about how little it takes on the page to render something correctly. But probably it also means that his sales were not high enough for him to be considered a writer who reached a large number of mainstream readers. This is too bad, because any reader, whether they are a writer, or a lover of humanity, a consumer of literature for the sake of it alone, has a great deal to find in here. Through the abilities of Busch, and his unfaltering benevolence, we learn that not only was he brave, he tells us something we should know: Most of us are brave. It is worth celebrating.

  HARDWATER COUNTRY

  WIDOW WATER

  WHAT TO KNOW about pain is how little we do to deserve it, how simple it is to give, how hard to lose. I’m a plumber. I dig for what’s wrong. I should know. And what I think of now as I remember pain is the fat young man and his child, their staggering house, the basement filled with death and dark water, the small perfect boy on the stone cellar steps who wept, the widow’s coffee gone cold.

  They called on Friday to complain that the pump in their basement wouldn’t work. Theirs is shallow-well country, a couple of miles from the college, a place near the fast wide river that once ran the mill that all the houses of the town depended on. The railroad came, the town grew, the large white clapboard houses spread. By the time their seedlings were in the middle growth, the mill had failed, the houses had run to blisters of rotted wood on the siding and to gaps in the black and green roofs. The old ones were nearly all dead and the railroad came twice a day, from Utica to Binghamton, to Utica from Binghamton, carrying sometimes some freight, sometimes a car of men who maintained the nearly useless track. And the new people came, took their children for walks on the river to the stone foundations of the mill. They looked at the water and went home. People now don’t know the water as they should. I’m a plumber, I should know.

  I told him I couldn’t come on a Friday afternoon in April, when the rains were opening seams and seals and cellars all through the country. Bella was making coffee for us while I took the call, and I snapped my fingers for her to turn around. She did, all broad—not fat, though—and full of colors—red in her face, yellow in her ha
ir going gray, the gold in her tooth, her eyes blue as pottery—and I pointed at the phone. She mouthed a mimic “Today, today, today,” and I nodded, and she nodded back and poured the almost boiling water out into the instant coffee, which dissolved.

  He said, “So you see, sir, we can use your help.”

  I said, “Yessir, sounds like a problem.”

  “No water, and we’ve got a boy who isn’t toilet-trained. It gets kind of messy.”

  “I imagine.”

  “So do you think you could ...”

  “Yessir?”

  “Come kind of soon?”

  “Oh, I’ll come kind of soon. It just won’t be today.”

  “You’re sure you couldn’t ...”

  “Yessir?”

  “Come today?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Yes sir, what?”

  “Yessir, I’m sure I can’t come.”

  Bella rapped on the table with her big knuckles to tell me to come and sit. I nodded, pointed at the telephone, waited for him to try once more. He was from the college—he would try once more.

  He said, “But no water—for how long? The weekend? All week?”

  I heard a woman whisper in the background with the harshness of a wife making peace, and then he said, “Uh—I mean, do you know when you can come?”

  I said, “When’re you up?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When do you wake up?”

  “We’ll be up. Just tell me when.”

  I said, “I’ll be there tomorrow morning, early, if that’s all right.”

  “I mean, how early?”

  “You get up, Mr. Samuels, and you have yourself a comfortable breakfast, and I’ll be there for a cup of your coffee.”

  He hung on the line, waiting for more. I gave him nothing more, and he said, “Thanks. I mean, we’ll see you tomorrow, then. Thank you.”