The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 4

  I felt like someone’s daughter.

  Leonard held my hand, then put it down as you would place Baccarat on a marble table—with deference to its quality, with care because it was fragile. And he began—precisely as if he were telling me of the rebel zealot Jesus, or of the building of Washington, or of the regulations governing off-shore fishing in Europe—to deliver another lecture. But this one was about his life.

  “My wife is named Belle. Did you know that? She’s a very tall woman, nearly as tall as you are. But she has bad feet, something to do with the instep, it’s terribly painful, and she tends to shuffle. For some reason, that makes her look shorter. When I tell you this, you should try to see her as someone who is short. She has friends on Long Island, younger than she—younger than I—who are very much involved in the restoration of Colonial furniture. Do you care about Colonial furniture?” He actually paused, waited to know, and I am quite certain that he did wonder, even at the moment, about my interests. I shook my head and lit another Chesterfield—he had to cup his hands around mine to shelter the flame from the wind—and then Leonard continued.

  “This happened last week, before I went to Paris. Did you know I’d been there? I’ll have to tell you about it. A ship seems to have disappeared, although the client insists it was sold to the Egyptians, under Panamanian registry, for purposes involving proscribed shipments to Northern Ireland. Our adversaries insist that the bill of lading was received and entered at Marseilles. The original owners are Americans—it’s out of Eric Ambler, did you ever read him?” He laughed and threw his hands up, shook his head. “It’s nonsense, and they’re all crooks. But I want you to know about last week, before my trip. Belle was supposed to spend the weekend with her friends, and they asked if I could drive out with them. It was time to say yes, and I did, and we met at their apartment, at University Place, to go together to their house on the Island. You know how I’ve been—sometimes my energy is pretty poor.” This time he didn’t smile.

  “Without going into details, let me say that I was pretty punk about it. Just as we were about to leave, I told Belle that I was too tired for the drive and that I’d go back to my apartment. She was furious, but she wasn’t surprised.” He looked at me so intensely that I looked away. “I want you to understand some of the complexities of our assumptions, Belle’s and mine. At any rate, I did go back, and they went on to Long Island.

  “My understanding is that Belle became worried about me”—he signaled for more drinks, brandy Alexander for me, white wine for him—“and woke up the poor host and made him drive her all the way back to New York at two in the morning, in a nasty rain. She has a key, of course, and let herself into my apartment.”

  “You weren’t there,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Because you moved in with Anya after I went uptown to Columbia.”

  “That’s not inaccurate.”

  “You keep the other place—”

  “As a cover. In an Eric Ambler novel, it would be called that, yes.” Leonard tried to smile, sipped his wine, frowned at it.

  “And you sort of live part-time with Anya?”

  He shrugged, raised his eyebrows, said, “It’s a simple clarity for a complex situation—but, yes. Yes.”

  “Can I be your law clerk, Leonard?”

  He grinned, with all his teeth this time, saying, “You mean you’re my student? You flatter me that much?”

  “Meaning I admire you very much.”

  He said, “You’ll be Law Review and start someplace so prestigious—”

  “Can I? Can I ask you again at the end of the year?”

  He blushed, like a young man having drinks with a girl at one of the city’s romantic saloons, and he said, “Yes. Please.”

  “Thank you, Leonard.”

  “But listen,” he said. “She came into an empty apartment and looked around—it’s tiny, a sofa bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom and closet. But she looked. And not only wasn’t I there, there were barely signs that I’d been there. I don’t know precisely what she began to know, but she began to know it. It was four in the morning by then. She sat there, by herself, not reading, not looking at television. She simply sat. Probably in the dark. And then, around six, she called the police and asked what to do. They told her she could file a missing persons report. What would that achieve? she asked. Nothing, they told her, except list me as missing and cause my name to be checked in emergency rooms and at the medical examiner’s office. She thought there was no point in that, she said. She said she knew that if I were sick or dead she’d find out fairly soon. Then she went down to Grand Central and rode home. She reached me at the office later that morning. I assured her that I had been all right. I told her not to worry herself.”

  “And she accepted that?”

  “She said she supposed foreign clients had arrived on a late plane and that I had to meet them.”

  “You let her believe that?”

  “I didn’t really answer. I told her I’d be home that weekend and told her to take care of herself, and we hung up.”

  “Leonard, she believed you?”

  “We believe what we need to, I suppose.”

  “Is that true?”

  He clasped his hands before him, in the air. The tips of his fingers were white and substanceless beneath the skin; they held the imprint of whatever they pressed upon. Shrugging his shoulders, he said, “It sounds true.”

  “Leonard, everything sounds true if you say it right.”

  “Dealing with other people’s truth can be a self-indulgent process,” he said. And then, as if to assure me that his remark was not meant merely to discipline me, he added, “We have been self-indulgent, I suppose, in a sense. Though we’ve been waiting for this. We’re waiting now.” And I didn’t know which we—my mother and he, or someone else’s mother and he—he meant.

  I finished my drink, and he ordered another round, and then he finished his. We sat in silence through the arrival of the drinks, and through our consumption of them, and through the waiter’s arrival with more. I smoked a lot and tried to think hard. Leonard waited patiently for me to have a reaction, or to discern what it was. I lit another cigarette—he cupped his hands for me again—and I blew smoke out, feeling that my tongue was raw, my throat sore, my head filled with childish exclamations and masterful formulations and the tune of a Robert Hall radio jingle. It was dark over the river now, but bright on the terrace, and ships were glimmering like fish as their superstructures caught the light the river absorbed. I said, “Life is confusing, Leonard,” and he was decent enough to try to keep his lips from curving. But he couldn’t, and then I couldn’t, and we laughed—whooped, really—until he walked around to my chair, leaned from behind to kiss my cheek, and then gripped my arm to help me up and get me to a cab.

  A year after his death—he died in his sleep, and in Westchester—I was spending the weekend helping my mother clean and cook for a party she’d decided it was necessary to give. As I vacuumed and put things away, grinding my teeth because I should have been uptown at my desk, I looked, thinking of my books, at the bedside bookcase. I saw Judgment on Deltchev by Eric Ambler. I thought of the Beekman Towers and Leonard’s lesson; I had been trying to understand it since he’d offered it to me, and particularly since his death—since the funeral we felt we couldn’t attend. I think our absence would have provoked his hesitant smile, but also grave pity for Anya and, I think, actual understanding of her relief at not having to watch him buried. Anya knew of his death when she read it in the Times.

  With the vacuum cleaner bellowing, I opened the book, saw Balkan names and descriptions of fear and subterfuge, and then a shade of baby blue—a piece of note-paper. I laughed, because only in stories and in the most arcane probate cases will a letter from the dead fall from among the pages of a book. But I was sure that I had found such a letter, and I did not laugh anymore. In the roar of Anya’s Electrolux, air pouring from an unstoppered vent, the old motor getting louder as it got
hotter, I sat on my mother’s bed and opened the folded single sheet. It was six-by-nine—perhaps half an inch longer each way—and where it had been folded, yellow-brown had supplanted the blue. A lion was engraved in the upper left-hand corner, and in the right it said Hôtel Lotti, 7 et 9, Rue de Castiglione, Paris. And below, nothing. No message I could read, no reminder, no clue. It was simply a bookmark, a convenience—it had nothing to say.

  I smelled the motor grinding and meat cooking in the kitchen and the harsh intimate scent of Anya’s Russia Leather. I was made physically sick by the blankness of the paper, its neat precise folds in which the brown discolorations pooled. I folded it and put it back in the book, and I thought of Leonard in a hotel room that smelled of paint. He lay on the long wide wooden bed in the Hôtel Lotti. Over a chair hung his trousers, wrinkled from the airplane, and on the bathroom doorknob hung his jacket, heavy with passport case and pens. He was in undershorts and undershirt, and his long black hose were held to his thin white calves by garters, black and tight. His feet nearly touched, and one arm lay on his chest while the other held Judgment on Deltchev. He was reading of failures and fealties, the corruptions of the sub-rosa world, and Anya was on 50th Street, and I was studying torts, and the man who had fathered me was living in Edgware, and I knew who my father was. I heard the shallow breathing and saw his thin white skull on the wide pillow, the dwindling body enclosed by the patterned wallpaper of the Hôtel Lotti.

  I was holding the paperback book when Anya came in to find me sitting on her bed. The noise of the vacuum cleaner broke around me like beach thunder. Her throat was slack now, and the flesh of her upper arms soft. In her black dressing gown she seemed pretentious and pathetic, too made up, as if she had costumed herself for solitude and, at the same time, me.

  She turned her head to the side as she looked at me; it was a dog’s motion of puzzlement, a gesture new for her, another sign of age in us both. She asked me, I think, what the matter was. But her voice did not carry through the sound of the machine.

  That was when I whispered, into all that mechanical rage, to all her worn-out loneliness, that I’d been studying too hard and needed to rest. I thought of Leonard Marcus’ wife and tried to picture her as short.

  That was when Anya mimed across the machine to me the question I read on her lips.

  She said: What? What?

  FAMILY CIRCLE

  IAN’S GRANDFATHER summoned him with sneezes. Bright silver light from the leaded windows behind his grandfather made the dust a steady snow, falling from nowhere onto the old man’s shoulders and the polished wood desk. Large in the morning light, he sat under an avalanche of shiny fineness, always being buried where he sat—slow storms of dust fell over him into his shadow on the smooth golden oak, disappearing—always untouched. From the doorway the old man was magical, and Ian watched as his grandfather crossed his arms and held himself by the shoulders and squeezed at the brown tweed cloth he wore and hunched his shoulders and pushed his chin down onto his chest and shuddered and closed his eyes and shook out the sneeze with an open-mouthed roar. He wiped the coarse sleeve across his mouth and nose—the left arm now hugged his heart—and like a cat licking fur, he rubbed the same sleeve on the desk, slowly back and forth, cleaning. When he saw Ian in the doorway, a little higher than the sculpted metal knob, the old man said, “What? What?” and Ian blew away.

  IAN’S MOTHER WAS changing Stuart’s diaper—here they called it nappy, but his mother said it smelled the same in England as it did in America—and Ian stood in his room and looked around the corner of the high cupboard that, with a dark green curtain, divided where he slept from the smaller room where his mother and Stuart had a double bed and a crib. He watched as she rolled Stuart over and swabbed him with a wash rag, then turned him over again to poke him in the stomach.

  Ian held himself and watched. Then he stopped smiling and backed away in his high black Wellingtons and his tight American jeans and went down the wooden steps into the main room, where they had their little kitchen and their dining table and couch and the fire that smoked. There were wooden beams on the low white ceiling, and dark chunks of wood floated in the white plaster walls. Ian stood in the room and they laughed upstairs. He took an apple down from the little refrigerator top and the sharp knife from the table. He sliced the apple, then took bread from the cupboard and made two sandwiches—chunks of thick-skinned apple between slices of bread. He put them on the wide white plates and carried them up the steps. At the doorway to his room he called, “It’s okay, Mom, I got breakfast for us. The baby can wait for his. I got us our breakfast first because we’re bigger.”

  BRENDA WAS in the field with the six horses, spreading hay from two bales in a wheelbarrow that she had slid, squeaking, from the old stables next door to the stone coalhouse and the little stone cottage where Ian and his mother and Stuart were staying. Next to their cottage was the big house, with its chimneys at either end. The grandfather stood in front of his house, looking down the walk and over the yew hedge and the stone fence to where Brenda, small and skinny in her dark green duffel coat and jeans and Wellingtons, fed the horses in the rain. He saw what the boy saw—a pony trying to enter the white and black mare.

  Ian, in his yellow slicker and hat, sitting under the overturned canvas-and-tubing sun chaise, called, “He’s putting a baby into her, Grampa. We’ll have puppies soon, won’t we?” The mare kicked away at the pony.

  High in his dark tweed sportcoat, rocking on his shoes with their built-up commando soles, the grandfather looked at the boy, and ran his big hand over his pink scalp and the black and white strands that crossed over it. “Puppies,” he said. “Ian, when horses have babies, they’re called foals. Foals, lad. Can you say that?”

  Ian said, “Foals.”

  His grandfather watched Brenda stand in the circle of mud and manure while the horses and ponies ate at the six stations of hay she’d made. At some signal no one ever saw, one horse would think of changing his station and another would respond, moving from his so that the first one could move, and then they all would move, in a slow rainy dance, while Brenda stood there in the center.

  “Brenda’s good,” the grandfather said.

  Ian’s mother came up from the cottage, carrying Stuart, both of them covered by the white canvas raincoat she held like a tent. She said, “Brenda’s got a crooked nose.”

  His grandfather said, “Got it the good way—she was twice kicked, had it broken twice, never set, never in hospital for it. She’s as tough as you. She’s tougher.”

  “She’s twenty-five years old, Daddy.”

  “Aye, all of that. She qualifies, all right.”

  His mother said, “For what?”

  His grandfather hugged his chest and ducked his face and wrenched his mouth about and let the sneeze curl out of his mouth and nose. He wiped his face with his sleeve.

  Stuart said, “Toooo!”

  His mother said, “Punishment.”

  His grandfather said, “Dinner,” and went inside.

  BRENDA WAS wearing a black halter and her dungarees and boots, and a scarf held her long brown hair in place behind her, on the neck. She rode out with three pony-trekkers shifting and wobbling like potato sacks on their thin saddles. She led them across the two-lane road and up a small access road that went to the foot of the fells. She waved to Ian. She had dropped the butt of her filtered cigarette on the dust and stones inside the green metal gate Ian closed for her, then stood on, climbing the rungs, waving back.

  When Ian jumped off the gate, the morning sun was high and hot. Sheep across the road moaned, and a truck coming down the 1:7 hill from the quarry at Broughton Moor filled the fields with the sound of its straining. The boy turned and saw that the small herd of two-year-old cattle in the outer field had followed him, were standing in a semicircle behind him, heads lowered, watching. As he moved, a white and gray heifer jumped backward and threw its face up.

  “Hello,” the boy said. “Hello.” Ian held a handful of
weed up to them and said, “Hello.”

  All their eyes watched.

  IAN’S MOTHER lay on the sun chaise in a bathing suit that was held together at the stomach by a metal ring. Her eyes were closed and her face was covered with tiny drops of oiled sweat. Her toes danced to the music from Brenda’s big brown radio which sat atop a stone wall, all that was left of a shed outside the old stables. Brenda rubbed oil onto tack, and Ian’s mother lay with almost a smile on her face, moving her feet. Stuart sat on the cobbles near Brenda, holding a red and white ball against his face, watching Brenda’s hands move. Ian, in Wellingtons and shorts, made a tiny house of stones and twigs. Everyone was quiet, and the radio played, and then the green metal gate two pastures down squeaked above the music and Brenda, without looking, said, “Oh, it must be another gifted horseman. I suppose I shall have to book the lot of rubbish for a ride.”

  Ian stood up to watch, then ran down to the gravel where cars were parked below the big house. He shouted, “Mommy, it’s the police. It’s the police, Mommy!”

  Brenda went down to him, lighting a cigarette, then standing with it sticking out of her mouth, her lips curled hard to hold it. “It’s taxi, Ian.” She called back to his mother, “Has our Ian not seen taxis before?”

  The driver let the man out at the second gate, the wooden one close by the stream that Brenda had told him was a dike and that his grandfather called a beck. But Ian’s mother had said he could call it a stream because that’s what they had in America.