The Stories of Frederick Busch Read online

  “It took us a while,” my father said.

  “Didn’t it now?”

  Bill went inside and returned with a bottle and glasses. He sat down next to my father, and I heard the gurgle, then a smacking of lips and, from my father, a low groan of pleasure, of uncontrol, which I hadn’t heard before. New information was promised by that sound, and I folded my arms across my chest for warmth and settled in to learn, from the invisibility darkness offered, and from the rhythm of the rattle of bottle and glass.

  I was jealous that Paula wanted boys in Colorado when I was there, and I was resigned—it was like fighting gravity, I knew—to not bulking sizably enough. Their voices seemed to sink into the cold black air and the smell of Paula’s cigarettes, and I heard few whole words—nothing, surely, about my vanished mother, or about my father and me—and what I knew next was the stubbly friction of my father’s cheek as he kissed me goodbye and whispered that he’d see me soon. I though that we were home and that he was putting me to bed. Then, when I heard the coarse noise of Bill’s truck, I opened my eyes and saw that I was on the canvas cot in Paula’s room in a bright morning in Maine. I was certain that he was leaving me there to grow up as a farmer, and I almost said aloud the first words that occurred to me: “What about school? Do I go to school here?” School meant breakfast, meant wearing clothes taken from the oak highboy in the room in Stony Brook, Long Island, meant coming downstairs to see my father making coffee while my mother rattled at The Times. The enormity of such stranding drove me in several directions as I came from the cot, “What about school?” still held, like scalding soup, behind my teeth and on my wounded tongue.

  Paula, at the doorway, shaking a blouse down over her brassiere—I could not move my eyes from the awful power of her underwear—called through the cloth, “Don’t you be frightened. You fell asleep and you slept deep. Frank and Daddy’re climbing, is all. Remember?” Though the cotton finally fell to hide her chest and stomach, I stared there, at strong hidden matters. We ate eggs fried in butter on a wood-fired stove while Molly drank coffee and talked about a dull moth which lived on Katahdin and which Bill might bring home. I stared at Paula’s lips as they closed around corners of toast and yellow runny yolks.

  We shoveled manure into the wheelbarrow Paula let me push, and we fed their dozen cows. One of them she’d named Bobo, and I held straw to Bobo’s wet mouth and pretended to enjoy how her nose dripped. I listened to the running-water noises of their stomachs, and I looked at the long stringy muscles in Paula’s tanned bare arms. Her face, long like her mother’s, but with high cheekbones and wide light eyes, was always in repose, as if she dreamed as she worked while naming for me the nature of her chores and the functions of equipment. I watched the sweat that glistened under her arms and on her broad forehead, and she sounded then like my father, when he took me to his office on a school holiday: I was told about the surfaces of everything I saw, but not of his relation to them, and therefore their relation to me. In Jefferson, Maine, as on East Fifty-second Street in Manhattan, as in Stony Brook, New York, the world was puzzling and seductive, and I couldn’t put my hands on it, and hold.

  We went across a blurred meadow that vibrated with black flies and tiny white butterflies that rose and fell like tides. On the crest of a little hill, under gray trees with wide branches and no leaves or fruit, Paula lay flat, groaning as if she were old, and stared up through bug-clouds and barren limbs and harsh sun. “Here,” she said, patting the sparse fine grass beside her. “Look.”

  I lay down next to her as tentatively as I might lie now beside a woman whom I’d know I finally couldn’t hold. Her arm was almost touching mine, and I thought I could feel its heat. Then the arm rose to point, and I smelled her sweat. “Look,” she said again. “He looks like he’s resting awhile, but he’s hanging onto the air. That’s work. He’s drifting for food. He’ll see a mole from there and strike it too.”

  Squint as hard as I might, there was nothing for me but bright spots the sun made inside my eyes. I tried to change the focus, as if I looked through my mother’s binoculars, but I saw only a branch above us, and it was blurry too. I blinked again; nothing looked right.

  “I guess I saw enough birds in my life,” I told her.

  “That’s right, isn’t it? Your mother’s a bird-watcher. In Colorado, too. I guess there’s trouble there.”

  “They’re taking separate vacations this year.”

  “They sure are. That’s what I mean about trouble. Man and wife live together. That’s why they get married. They watch birds together, if that’s what they do, and they climb up mountains together, and they sleep together in the same bed. Do Frank and Angie sleep in the same bed?”

  I was rigid lest our arms touch, and the question made me stiffer. “I don’t see your mother climbing any mountains,” I said.

  “Well, she’s too fat, honey. Otherwise she would. And if this wasn’t a trip for your father and mine to take alone, a kind of special treat for them, you can bet me and Momma would be there, living out of a little canvas tent and cooking for when Daddy came back down, bug-bit and chewed up by rocks. And you won’t find but one bed for the two of them. I still hear them sometimes at night. You know. Do you?”

  “Oh, sure. I hear my mom and dad too.” That was true: I heard them talking in the living room, or washing dishes after a party, or playing music on the Victrola. “Sure,” I said, suspecting that I was soon to learn things terrible and delicious, and worried not only because I was ashamed of what I didn’t hear, but because, if I did hear them, I wouldn’t know what they meant. The tree limb was blurred, still, and I moved to rub my eyes.

  Then that girl of smells—her cigarette smoke lay over the odor of the arm she’d raised—and of fleshy swellings and mysterious belly and the awesome mechanics of brassieres, the girl who knew about me and my frights, about my parents and their now-profound deficiencies, said gently, “Come on back to my room. I’ll show you something.”

  When she stood, she took my hand; hers was rough and dry and strong. She pulled me back over field and fences, and I thrilled to the feel of flesh as much as I hated the maternity with which she towed me. But I thought, too, that something alarming was about to be disclosed. I couldn’t wait to be told, though I was scared.

  Molly was putting clothes through a mangle near the rain barrel, and she waved as we passed. We went through cool shadows into the room Paula had decorated with Dick Powell’s picture, and Gable’s, and on the far wall a blurred someone with a moustache wore tights and feathered hat and held a sword.

  “My library,” she said, opening the closet. “Here.” And on shelves, stacked, and in shaggy feathering heaps on the closet floor, were little yellowing books and bright comics and magazines that told the truth about the life of Claudette Colbert and Cary Grant. I doubt that she knew what I needed, for she was mostly a teenage kid on a little farm in Maine. She wasn’t magical, except to me in her skin, although she was smarter than I about the life I nearly knew I led. But something made her take me from the swarm of sun and insects, the high-hanging invisible bird of prey—that place where, she possibly knew, I sensed how much of my life was a secret to me—and she installed me on the dirty floor of a dirty house, in deepening afternoon, half-inside a closet where, squinting, I fell away from the world and into pictures, words.

  I read small glossy-jacketed books, little type on crumbling wartime paper, with some line drawings, about Flash Gordon and Ming the Merciless and the plight of the always-kidnapped Dale. I read about death rays and rockets that went to Mars from Venus as quickly as they had to for the sake of mild creatures with six arms who were victimized by Ming’s high greed. Dale and the other women had very pointed breasts and often said, “Oh, Flash, do you really think so?”

  And there was Captain Marvel, whose curling forelock was so much like Superman’s, but whom I preferred because I thought we looked alike and because he never had to bother to change his clothes to get mighty: he said Shazam! and a lightn
ing bolt made him muscular and capable of rescuing women with long legs. I read of Superboy, whose folks in Smallville were so proud of him. Littler worlds, manageable by me, and on my behalf by people who could change, whether in phone booths or storerooms or explosions of light, into what they needed to be: Aqua-Man, Spider Man, the Green Lantern, wide-nostriled Wonder Woman in her glass airplane, and always Flash and Dale, “Oh, Flash, do you really think so?”

  For a while, Paula sat behind me, cross-legged on her bed, reading fan magazines and murmuring of Gary Cooper’s wardrobe and the number of people Victor Mature could lift into the air. When she went out, she spoke and I answered, but I don’t remember what we said. I leaned forward in the darkness, squinting and forgetting to worry that I had to screw my face around my eyes in order to see, and I stayed where I was, which was away.

  They had a radio, and we listened to it for a while after dinner, and then Molly showed me, in a room off the kitchen, board after board on which dead moths were stiffly pegged. I squinted at them and said “Wow,” and while Paula and Molly sat in sweaters on the porch and talked, I squatted in the closet’s mouth, under weak yellow light, and started Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Chessmen of Mars. When Paula entered to change into nightclothes, I was lured from the cruel pursuit of Dejah Thoris by Gahan of Gathol, for the whisper of cloth over skin was a new music. But I went back with relief to “The dazzling sunlight of Barsoom clothed Manator in an aureole of splendor as the girl and her captors rode into the city through the Gate of Enemies.”

  When Paula warned me that the lights were going off, I stumbled toward my cot, and when they were out I undressed and went to sleep, telling myself stories. And next day, after breakfast and a halfhearted attempt to follow her through chores, I walked over the blurred field to the rank shade of Paula’s room, and I sat in the closet doorway, reading of Martian prisons, and heroes who hacked and slew, unaware that I had neither sniffed nor stared at her, and worried only that I might not finish the book and start another before my father and Bill returned. They didn’t, and we ate roast beef hash and pulpy carrots, and Molly worked in the shed on the motor of their kitchen blender while Paula listened to “Henry Aldrich” and I attended to rescues performed by the Warlord of Mars.

  It was the next afternoon when my father and Bill returned in the truck. They were dirty and tired and beaming, and they smelled like woodsmoke. My father hugged me and kissed me so hard that he hurt me with his unshaved cheeks. He swatted my bottom and rubbed my shoulders with his big hands. Bill presented Molly with a dirty little moth and she clapped her hands and trilled. Paula smoked cigarettes and sat on the porch between Bill and my father, listening, as if she actually cared, to Bill’s description of how well my father had done to follow him up Abel’s Slide, where the chunks of stone were like steps too high to walk, too short and smooth to climb, and up which you had to spring, my father broke in to say, “Like a goat in a competition. I thought my stomach would burst, following this—this kid. That’s you, Bill, part mountain goat and part boy. I don’t know how you stayed young for so long. You were the oldest man in the outfit, and what you did was you stayed where you were and I got ancient.”

  “Nah. Frank, you’re in pretty good shape. For someone who makes his living by sitting on his backside. I’ll tell you that. You did swell.”

  “Well, you did better. How’s that?”

  Bill swallowed beer and nodded. “I’d say that’s right.”

  And they both laughed hard, in a way the rest of us could only smile at and watch.

  “Damn,” my father said, smiling so wide. “Damn!”

  My head felt hot and the skin of my face was too tight for whatever beat beneath it. They were shimmering shapes in the afternoon light, and I rubbed my eyes to make them work in some other way. But what I saw was as through a membrane. Perhaps it was Paula’s cool hand on my face that did it, and the surge of smells, the distant mystery of her older skin and knowledge which I suddenly remembered to be mastered by. Perhaps it was the distance my father had traveled over and from which, as I learned from the privacies of his laughter, he still had not returned. Perhaps it was Molly, sitting on the porch steps next to Bill, her hand on his thigh. Or perhaps it was the bird I couldn’t see which hung over Jefferson, Maine, drifting to dive. I pushed my face against Paula’s hard hand and I rubbed at my eyes and I started to weep long coughing noises which frightened me as much as they must have startled the others.

  My father’s hobbed climbing boots banged on the porch as he hurried to hold me, but I didn’t see him because I knew that if I opened my eyes I would know how far the blindness had progressed. I didn’t want to know anything more. He carried me inside while I wailed like a hysterical child—which is what I was, and what I’m sure I felt relieved to be. I listened to their voices when they’d stilled my weeping and asked me questions about pain. I swallowed aspirin with Kool-Aid and heard my father discover the comics and the books I’d read while on my separate vacation. And the relief in his voice, and the smile I heard riding on his breath, served to clench my jaw and lock my hands above my eyes. Because he knew, and they knew, and I still didn’t, though I now suspected, because I always trusted him, that I wouldn’t die and probably wouldn’t go blind.

  “Just think of your mother’s glasses, love,” he whispered while the others walked from the room. He sat on the bed and stroked my face around my fists, which still stayed on my eyes. “Mother has weak eyes, and these things can be passed along—the kids can get them from their parents.”

  “You mean I caught it from her?”

  The bed I was in, Paula’s bed—I smelled her on the pillow and the sheets—shook as he nodded and continued to stroke my face. “Like that. Just about, yes. I bet when we go home, and we go to the eye doctor, he’ll put a chart up for you to read. Did you have these tests in school? He’ll ask you to read the letters, and he’ll say you didn’t see them too clearly, and he’ll tell us to get you some glasses. And that’s all. I promise. It isn’t meningitis, it isn’t polio—”

  “Polio?” I said. “Polio?”

  “No,” he said. “No. No, it isn’t a sickness. I’m sorry I said that. I was worried for a minute, but now I’m not, I promise. You hear? I’m promising you. Your eyes are weak. Your head’ll feel better from the aspirin—it’s just eyestrain, love. It’s nothing more.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Some dumb vacation. I should have gone with Mommy.”

  I lay in a woman’s bed, and in the warmth of her secrets, and in the rich smell of what was coming to me. And my father sat there as his large hands gentled my face. His hands never left me. I dropped my fists, though I kept my eyes closed tight. I felt his strong fingers, roughened by rocks, as they ran along my eyebrows, touched my cheeks, my hairline, my forehead, then eyebrows again, over and over, until, with great gentleness, they dropped upon the locked lids, and he said, “No, no, this is where you should be.” So I hid beneath my father’s hands, and I rested awhile.

  RISE AND FALL

  HIS FATHER ROSE early and climbed the attic stairs to bathe in the farthest tub of their house. He came home from work for dinner at seven o’clock. In between for Jay Reese it was school, and his mother in the late afternoon; at every hour, though, he was the kind of boy who liked living alone. But especially after the war—during which he had lived by himself with his mother—while he was being six and seven and eight, his father was the figure disappearing in the early part of the morning, and then coming home from the practice of the law while the day went dark.

  He remembered his father in two weekend costumes from those days in the Midwood section of Flatbush, in Brooklyn in New York, when the old trees made the air green in summer and were a network of traps, during the autumn and early winter, for the pink Spaulding rubber ball the boys would bat, with a sawed-off broomstick, as far down the narrow street as they could. In hot weather, his father would, on Saturdays, wear one of two seersucker suits. There was a brown-and-white stripe, there
was a gray-and-white stripe, and each jacket buttoned tight at the waist, and the trousers of each would cling to his father’s thin calves. He always thought it was his father’s garters and long hose that made the trousers cling. With the brown suit his father would wear a Panama hat; with the gray, a fedora made of gray straw. And, often, there his father would be, emerging from the hot brown cars of the BMT subway at the elevated Avenue H station, obviously not thinking of his older son because he was always surprised to see that he had pedaled over the Avenue H footbridge down the leafy streets past the wide brick or stucco houses where, on Saturdays, so many fathers mowed lawns or clipped hedges or threw baseballs to kids. His father worked on Saturdays until Jay was nearly out of college, and his father, on so many of those Saturdays, in the early afternoon, tall and strong and bald and handsome in a way that used to be called manly, came out of the BMT and was surprised to see his son. They went home in, for the father, a march, and a slow ticking of bicycle gears for the son, who made his legs act patient as he wobbled his front wheel so that he might go slowly and not fall down. They were nearly side-by-side.

  The other costume he recalled—the son was the sort of grownup who would dwell on melancholy matters and tatters torn back from the past—was his heavy winter coat. It was a camouflage coat, and his father had worn it in the Second World War. Jay spent a good deal of time in looking the coat over carefully for blood. It was an unbloodied coat, however, and on Sunday mornings in winter, after his father had looked at The Times, and while his mother tried to sneak into her own life in another room for a few private moments, his father, if there was snow on the ground, would tell Jay and his little brother, Jonas, to get dressed for the cold. Jay would dress himself, and his father would slide Jonas into a snowsuit that left him immobile, a two-year-old doll bundled under wool and nylon and rubber except for his nose and sad eyes and solemn mouth. Jay would wear a dull plaid mackinaw over sweater and flannel shirt, and the corduroy knickers that slid into the tops of his boots. His father, also in a mackinaw and woolen pants and boots, would add the camouflage shell, khaki on one side and snow-white on the other. His father always wore the snow-side out, and only when Jay was grown would he wonder what purpose such camouflage, in Brooklyn, New York, in the 1940s and ’50s, might serve.