The Stories of Frederick Busch Read online

I said, “Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  “Not for a while.”

  “Oh. Well, then what happened to him?”

  “He just got big. He grew up.”

  “Does he go to the college?”

  “He’s bigger than that, even.”

  Mac smiled and showed his hand, fingers held together. “That big? So big?”

  “Bigger,” I said.

  Mac said, “That’s a big boy you have.”

  SAMUELS HANDED ME the foil and coat hanger. I rolled the foil around a cigar until it was a cylinder, and I stuck it in the well side of the nozzle. I opened the hanger and straightened her out.

  Mac said, “What’s he doing, Daddy?”

  Samuels said, “I don’t know. I don’t know, Mac. Why don’t you go outside? I don’t know.”

  I said, “Mr. Samuels, I wonder if you would hold that foil firmly in there and cup your hand under it while I give her a shove.”

  He held. Mac watched him. I pushed at the other side of the jet, felt it, pushed again, and it rolled down the aluminum foil to his palm: a flat wet pebble half the size of the nail on his little finger. He said, “That’s it? That’s all it is? This is what ruined my life for two days?”

  I said, “That’s all it ever takes, Mr. Samuels. It came up with the water—you have to have gravel where there’s water—and it lodged in the jet, kept the pressure from building up. If it happens again, I’ll put a screen in at the check valve. May never happen again. If it does, we’ll know what to do, won’t we?”

  Samuels said, “I wonder when I’ll ever know what to do around here.”

  I said, “You’ll learn.”

  I fastened the halves of the pump together, then went out for my jeep can, still half full from the widow’s house. I came back in and I unscrewed the pipe plug at the top of the pump and poured the water in, put the plug back on, connected the pump to the switch.

  Mac jumped, then stood still, holding to his father’s leg.

  The pump chirred, caught on the water from the widow’s well, drew, and we all watched the pressure climb to forty, heard the motor cut out, heard the water climb in the copper pipes to the rest of the house as I opened the valve.

  I was putting away tools when I heard Samuels say, “Now keep away from there!” I heard the whack of his hand on Mac’s flesh, and heard the weeping start, in the back of the boy’s throat, and then the wail. Samuels said, “That’s filthy in there—Christ knows what you’ve dragged up. And I told you not to mess with things you don’t know anything about. Dammit!”

  Mac wailed louder. I watched his face clench and grow red, ugly. He put his left sleeve in his mouth and chewed on it, backed away to the stone steps, fumbled with his feet and stepped backwards up one step. “But Dad-dy,” he said. “But Dad-dy.” Then he stood on the steps and chewed his sleeve and cried.

  Samuels said, “God, look at that.”

  I said, “There’s that smell you’ve been smelling, Mr. Samuels. Mouse. He must’ve fallen into the sump and starved to death and rotted there. That’s what you’ve been smelling.”

  “God. Mac—go up and wash your hands. Mac! Go upstairs and wash your hands. I mean now!”

  The small brown lump of paws and tail and teeth, its stomach swollen, the rest looking almost dissolved, lay in its puddle on the floor beside the sump. The stink of its death was everywhere. The pump cut in and built the pressure up again. Mac stood on the cellar steps and cried. His father pushed his glasses up and looked at the corpse of the rotted mouse and hugged his arms around himself and looked at his son. I walked past Samuels, turned away from the weeping boy, and pushed up at the lever that the float, if he had left it there, would have released on the sump pump. Nothing happened, and I stayed where I was, waiting, until I remembered to plug the sump pump in. I pushed the lever again, its motor started, the filthy reeking water dropped, the wide black rubber pipe it passed through on the ceiling swung like something alive as all that dying passed along it and out.

  I picked the mouse up by its tail after the pump had stopped and Samuels, waiting for my approval, watching my face, had pulled out the plug. I carried my tools under my arm and the jeep can in my hand. I nodded to Samuels and he was going to speak, then didn’t, just nodded back. I walked past Mac on the steps, not crying anymore, but wet-faced and stunned. I bent down as I passed him. I whispered, “What shall we do with your Daddy?” and went on, not smiling.

  I walked to the truck in their unkempt drive that went to the barn that would fall. I carried the corpse. I thought to get home to Bella and say how sorry I was for the sorrow I’d made and couldn’t take back. I spun the dripping mouse by its tail and flung it beyond the barn into Keeper’s field of corn stumps. It rose and sank from the air and was gone. I had primed the earth. It didn’t need the prime.

  THE LESSON OF THE HÔTEL LOTTI

  MY MOTHER’S LOVER was always exhausted, and yet he generated for me, and I think for her too, a sense of the most inexhaustible gentleness, and the strong calm I grew up thinking a prerequisite for love. He was a lawyer with offices at the foot of Manhattan, a neighborhood he knew intimately and talked about compellingly. The son of Austrian immigrants, a Jew, he lectured gently on Trinity Church and practiced maritime law, a field not famous for its renunciations of the more vulgar bigotries. He was the same age as my mother, fifty-five, when they started practicing deceptions and certainly cruelties upon his wife. And when my mother died at sixty-two, a couple of years after he did, she had suffered the most dreadful solitude, for he was necessary.

  I was unplanned, unexpected, and apparently less than desirable. Born when my mother was thirty-nine, I was doubtless part of what happened not long thereafter. My father, who owned yards—a pleasure-craft boat yard, two lumberyards, and part of an undistinguished California vineyard—left my mother, and me, for a woman with inherited land in a suburb of London called Edgware. I have been there, for reasons I don’t need to make clear; it looks like Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, though less permanent—every other house seems to be in a state of rebuilding or repair—and I never will need to go back. I grew up as much my mother’s younger sister as her child. And the older I became, the more accomplished I was said to be, so my mother grew more fatigued by the world, more easily dismayed.

  I have composed some recollections, for the sake of sentiment—I don’t want to lose anything now—and so I think that I recall him standing silently at the door of our apartment on East 50th Street, late one night, as they returned from the theater. He seemed reluctant to walk farther in. I think I remember his smile: lips tightly closed (he had bad teeth), the long frown-lines from the nose to the corners of his mouth (they later became the boundaries of jowls), the pale blue eyes content but ready not to be. I think I can call him ironic, in the sense that he inspired, and dealt with, several emotions at once; he never surrendered to sarcasm. He looks larger in this possible early recollection than he was but, then, I feel smaller, when I remember him, than I am. He was nearly six feet tall, but because of his short legs he looked less large when I knew him well. His head was bald, the fringe gone chestnut and white. His face was square, his neck solid but not thick. His nose was wide without being bulbous. He was a slender man with a broad chest and strong shoulders, and he dressed in dark expensive suits. His voice was deep; it could snap and yap and snarl, or it could rumble soothingly as he spoke of what he loved, and nearly always when he talked to me it was with a graveled gentleness I have heard no other man use.

  For years, my mother spoke of “my attorney,” or “my legal adviser,” or, as I grew older, “our lawyer.” Then it became “Leonard Marcus says” and then “Leonard.” He came to my graduation from the Brearley School, and I introduced him as “my Uncle Leonard,” although my mother had never called him that. The night of my graduation, the three of us had dinner at the Russian Tea Room and went to a revival of Our American Friend. I thereafter left for a party with classmates, and when I came home early b
ecause I had decided to age quickly by finding myself bored with my intimate companions of four years, I found my mother waiting in the living room for a talk.

  For a talk: a separate category in our lives, signaled by a silver drinks tray on the coffee table, a round stone ashtray, and a packet of Player’s cigarettes, which my mother had come more and more to smoke too many of—perhaps to remind her, in distress, of the England my father had fled to. The sailor on the packet had blue eyes, and on his hatband was the word HERO.

  She wore a long challis housecoat and no slippers, and sat in a corner of the sofa with a plaid blanket held across her lap; I had bought the blanket for her in England during my pointless pilgrimage there the summer before. We greeted each other matter-of-factly, per our tacit agreement not to become hysterical until it was clearly a necessity, and for a few minutes we discussed how remarkably mature I had become, in contrast to my friends, in the course of a single evening. She made herself a drink—Calvados and soda with ice—and I made my own sophisticated bourbon and ginger ale. She lit a Player’s Navy Cut, hissed smoke out at me, and then caught her breath as I took a package of Kools from my bag and lit up too.

  “Well, well,” she said.

  I shrugged.

  “About Leonard,” she said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Leonard’s at home with his wife.”

  I puffed as if the cigarette were a pipe. My face beat hot, and I’m sure I felt the same sense of landslide felt by children who in their teens are asked, “Did you ever think you might be adopted, darling?” But I managed to say, as if it weren’t the second commencement of the day, “Gee, I didn’t know he was married, Anya.”

  “Leonard is a married man,” my mother said, nodding, and with a note of pride in her voice—a sound I would hear again when I came home from Vassar to discuss with her my first and unspectacular coupling, with a boy from Union College.

  “Has he been married—uh—all the time?”

  My mother nodded and drank some brandy, said across the rim of her glass, “We have always been having an affaire.” Her French was manifest and overaccented; she was an educated woman, and never untheatrical. “He is not your uncle, darling.”

  “Well, that’s all right, Anya.”

  “Susu,” she said.

  “Anya, would you mind very much calling me Suzanne?” I said.

  So I was Suzanne, and he was not Uncle Leonard, nor simply our attorney, Leonard Marcus. And shortly, we were a domestic routine. Once the declaration had been made, it wasn’t mentioned again—by me, because I was in awe of an affaire conducted by a woman with varicose veins who was my humdrum, pretty, and flustered mother; by her, because I tried very hard that summer to rarely be home.

  I worked at the neighborhood Gristede’s during the day, and at night I kept moving—the evening jazz concerts at the Museum of Modern Art, or Shakespeare in the Park, or films at the Thalia, or shopping for frights on Eighth Street in the Village, or posed and dramaturgical dates ending with kisses on the Staten Island ferry slip and several near-misses—and near-disasters—in the cars and homes of boys who belonged to poetry clubs at Lafayette or to rugby clubs at Yale.

  I felt, in part, like an elder sister, or a mother even, who was giving Anya as much privacy as possible with her beau. And then, in late August, when I was beginning to shop for school and to face the fact that going to Poughkeepsie frightened me, I returned to the apartment on a Saturday afternoon after swimming at Rye with friends—I had, by then, forgiven them their youth—to find Leonard on the sofa in the living room, and Anya in a true state of fear.

  His head was what I saw first, propped on a crocheted pillow that leaned against the arm rest. It was white, and I saw blue veins near the surface of the skin, and beads of perspiration that looked like oil; they didn’t run or drip. He wore his polished black wingtips, and it was their position that frightened me. They didn’t touch, nor did they lie as if he sprawled at rest; they were apart because his legs were slightly apart, the dark blue poplin suit soaked onto them by sweat, to show how thin his thighs and calves were. There was a terrible weakness in his posture, a sense of the exhaustion of resources. His hands lay on his stomach, barely, as if he hadn’t strength enough to lift his arms. His breathing was shallow—I looked to be certain that he breathed. He opened his eyes, and their blueness made his pallor seem worse. He smiled and then his lips made the shape one makes to whistle. He was showing me that he knew how he looked, and that he felt as ill as he appeared, and that he, and disability, and us together—me poised over and before him in uselessness and perplexity—were something of a joke we each understood. But no noise came from his lips. I touched my own lips with my index finger, as if hushing him, as if dispelling the confession he would make, and I turned away quickly to find Anya in the bedroom, where I knew she would be, smoking Player’s and crossing her legs.

  I sat on the bed beside her. But she sat up taut, so I moved away. “It’s the heat,” she said.

  “It looks like more than the heat, Anya.”

  “It’s the heat because it’s more than the heat. He has a bad heart. He’s been seeing doctors.”

  “What are they planning to do?”

  “Nothing. Medication. They say he’s too old for the kind of surgery he needs.”

  And that, as much as Leonard’s condition, was what made her start to weep. I think she had been waiting in that darkened bedroom filled with cigarette smoke and the hum of air-conditioning for someone to whom she could state that cruelty: that she, a slender woman in shorts and a halter, a woman with a young throat atop a body that was no disgrace despite the varicose veins, a woman who for years had conducted in perfect French an affaire with a man of gentle elegance—she, such a woman, now faced the continuation of a lesson she had received when my father left us years before. The lesson was about things running down—respect and trust and strength, and finally time.

  I said, “Anya, can I ask you something?”

  She sniffed and wiped her face with the back of a pale beautiful wrist. “When you ask if you can ask, Susu—Suzanne—it means you know you shouldn’t ask it. Do you really need to?”

  I said, “Do you and Leonard make love?”

  She exploded into tears then, perhaps because her answer—not the impertinence or heartlessness of the question—was another segment of the lesson she must learn. “We used to,” she said, as she tried to catch her breath.

  “He can’t anymore?”

  “Suzanne!”

  And her genuine dignity, a surprising muscularity of tone, her wonderful slight carriage, the beauty of her hair and neck, and certainly the specter of Poughkeepsie and my sense of the blackness beyond what I managed to know—all brought me into her arms, leaning over her, smelling her hair, wishing that I wept only for her.

  HER LETTERS TO SCHOOL described his frailty and determination. My visits home confirmed them. They were together a great deal, and Leonard came to 50th Street with gifts—a book, a pen from Mark Cross, a scarf purchased at Liberty on one of his transatlantic trips. I grew accustomed, over that first year of school and then the others, to his slower walk, a loss of tension in his bearing, his need to pause and catch his breath, the permanent pallor of his face, his need for naps. His illness aged my mother, and I accepted that as well: I felt ten years older than I was, and it seemed appropriate to me that my mother should not look young. Leonard worked harder than before, and Anya tried to convince him to retire.

  I was studying in my room at home one weekend, with the door ajar, when I heard her ask him, again, to slow his pace. He snapped at her, “I have to provide for a wife—remember? She’s getting on, like us.”

  That was in my sophomore or junior year, and on the New York Central to Poughkeepsie that Sunday evening I stared out the window at the Hudson, which in the last sunlight looked like ice although it was nearly May, and I thought as hard as I could about Leonard’s wife. I knew that he had been married to her for some thirty year
s. I knew that their child was grown and away. I knew that they maintained a home in Westchester County but that Leonard, complaining of fatigue, had furnished an apartment in the east forties where he stayed during the week. I knew that he often found a reason for staying in the city over weekends as well—that is, he found an alibi to broadcast in Westchester; I knew the reason. I wondered how much his wife knew, and I fell asleep refusing to believe that she didn’t know it all.

  I spent a week preparing for final exams, and made use of one of Leonard’s lectures. This one had been on the Dead Sea scrolls. He had lent me three books and had told me what he knew. As I studied, I heard the low sweet voice, smelled the breath of decay, saw the round-shouldered posture he more and more assumed, and the sad ironic smile—a kind of shyness, I concluded—on the handsome white face. And I studied history, and Platonic posturings—“‘But, sirs, it may be that the difficulty is not to flee from death, but from guilt. Guilt is swifter than death’”—and thought, again, that Dryden really needn’t have bothered. I was studying Leonard Marcus, my mother’s lover, and wondering why he, who had in spirit left his wife, was of a different category of being from my father, who had left his wife in fact. It pleases me to remember that, although I couldn’t answer the question, I knew that Leonard Marcus was different. And thinking of my small rattled mother, or of Leonard’s low devoted tones caressing the history of the Jefferson Administration, say, or of the angry assertion of his wife’s need for money in old age, I am now—callow an impulse as it is—proud.

  Leonard was not allowed to drink, and I had sworn myself to ignore his married life. We renounced those imperatives together in New York after he had returned from a business trip to Paris, and after I had begun my first semester at Columbia Law. Leonard called me at John Jay Hall and asked me to meet him at the Top of the Towers. I dressed nervously and too stylishly, and was quiet as we rode the elevator to the top of the Beekman Arms. We sat at a little table on the terrace and looked over the stone balustrade at the river, which, from that enormous distance, looked clean. The entire city looked clean and manageable, and knowing that it was an illusion helped me swear to myself that for this shrinking man who always, now, was out of breath, I would sustain whatever illusions he required of me. The winds up there were strong, despite the heat of late September, and I thought Leonard shivered. But when I suggested that we move indoors, he smiled that shy smile, shrugged his shoulders, and ordered drinks. He bought me a brandy Alexander, as if I were half child and we were combining the magic of a milkshake and the necessity that a dignified law student enjoy strong drink.