The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 9

  His father pulled Jonas on their small wooden sled, while Jay, like a warrior, carried the longer sled at port-arms across Avenue I, and toward the footbridge at Avenue H, over which pedestrians might walk while, underneath, the freight trains of the Long Island Railroad rumbled, heading for the Atlantic Avenue terminal and then out of Brooklyn to the rest of the world. It was a great concrete slab, that arching bridge, with meshwire sides and both a railed ramp and a set of concrete steps. You could stand on it and look down as the train came by, throwing heat and sound. Next to the steps was a patch of waste ground, beside a small pale apartment house. And in the area between the apartments and the bridge, fathers stood and talked easily, without intimacy, or they read their Sunday papers, swaying as though they hung onto handstraps aboard the BMT, and no trains ran below, and children—Jay, alone, and then sometimes with Jonas tucked before him, seated, or clinging prone to his back—rode shrieking down the long gradual hill to stop in the deeper snow some twenty feet or so from the double set of tracks.

  And one day, in the winter, after Christmastime, Jay remembered, he and Jonas and their father went to the bridge to sled and were met by a group of puzzled fathers and children. They stood, looking at the newcomers and then back to the waste ground from which the sleds were launched, to see the new fence. There was something miraculous about it, because although children had walked and biked there, and though certain fathers, Jay’s among them, had walked on the bridge twice a day all week, no one, apparently, had seen the fence erected. It was very high, and was attached, on the right, to the bridge itself, and, on the left, to a 10- or 12-foot metal pole beside the apartment house. It was a tall wire fence of the sort that keeps people out of, or trapped inside, the recess yards of public schools. Many of them stood at the fence and held the heavy, woven mesh. And then Jay’s father pointed out to the others that the overhead electric wires, running beneath the bridge and above the tracks, were different—they had new hues of glass transformer, and large metal boxes of a different shape were affixed to creosoted poles, and the wire itself was a thicker and shinier black. They agreed, the fathers, while their children stamped and whined and looked about, that these were “high power lines,” though no one knew the meaning of what they agreed on. To keep the children of the Avenue H neighborhood safe, their sledding ground was closed.

  Of course, children learned to sneak under the fence soon enough, and to climb over the side of the bridge and hang by their hands and pull themselves, dangling in the air, to the side of the hill and then tumble until their balance was caught, and then be safely standing on what was forbidden. Some threw sleds over in winter and then climbed over the bridge—for a while, Jay was among them. Some climbed over in warmer weather to huddle under the bridge, as if it rained and they were camping, in order to have a hidden place for smoking their Old Gold cigarettes. And two boys, who came from across Ocean Avenue, climbed over and shinnied along the girders beneath the bridge and fell onto the lines and were burned to death by the electricity. A man who lived in the apartment house, a Silesian bookbinder named Jankowicz who bound Jay’s mother’s magazines into volumes, had reported to Jay’s parents that when the police lifted the bodies up to the bridge and took them off in a long green truck, the limbs were stiff and the flesh was dark, “like they was cooked,” his mother reported that Jankowicz had said. She reported it a lot. And Jay thought of roasted bellies and crusts of dark buttock and he stopped climbing over the bridge. But that was later, after the day when the fathers and sons stood interdicted by a fence in a neighborhood that was largely without such barriers. It was a witty but to him forgivable formulation, as Jay thought of it later on, waxing sentimental over his father’s wardrobe and his early life in the quiet, gentle district where they’d lived: the world had, one weekend, announced to the children of children of immigrants, many of whom thought of themselves as living in the almost-prosperous not-quite-suburbs, that they could descend as swiftly as they wished, in silence or in frightened laughter; the danger, said the diamond-shapes of thick linked fence, the bright black wire, the energy that snaked within it, was in trying to rise.

  JONAS, HIS BROTHER, had soared. Like their father, he went to law school and then was a clerk, of sorts, in a shabby firm of men whose wages came from defending the malfeasances and tax shelters of businessmen with overseas interests. Jonas was in fact above that kind of law, at least as often as he could be. He moved on, a junior partner in a firm whose practice was exclusively international law. And then, on lower Broadway in Manhattan, across the street from Trinity Church and hard by Brooks Brothers, Jonas rented quarters for himself and a secretary and two other men, and he became Reese, Kupkind & Slatauer, and at meetings of the New York Bar Association, he served on the foreign law committee. He took taxis to work, from Yorkville, and when they spoke by telephone every few months—each might have sworn, Jay suspected, that they’d spoken within the past week—Jonas reported savagely to Jay on how, from families still in the old neighborhood, he had learned of sweeping ethnic shifts, brown skins edging out white, and rumors of voodoo practiced within three-quarters of a mile of the synagogue that Eleanor Roosevelt herself had opened with a garbled Hebrew phrase in 1953.

  Jay had gone to Moravian and then to the medical college of the University of Pennsylvania. To their father, going to any out-of-town college was a step up from his own attendance at Brooklyn College. Moravian was a major school to him, therefore, and the move to Penn had been pure triumph. Jonas’s acceptance, with a scholarship, by Reed, had actually made their father weep. When they were together, and drinking too much, Jonas went wet at the eyes, remembering their father’s tears. Jonas had come home for law school, attending Columbia while living at International House, uptown, and then moving to an apartment at 112th and Riverside. Jay had gone from Penn to a residency in Syracuse, at Upstate Hospital, and then he had moved downstate into Duchess County, near Poughkeepsie, where he practiced pediatrics and lived in a large white house that had been started in the eighteenth century and, according to Jay, had rarely been lived in since. He claimed to Jonas that most of his money went toward making up for years of rot and structural decline. He never talked about the tall, coal-colored woman he had married in Philadelphia, and had lived with for two years, and who had left him for a man in Durham, North Carolina.

  Jonas married too. His wife was named Norma, their daughter Joanne, their son Joseph. The grandparents were healthy and transplanted and long-lived in Miami. The boys were men now, Jonas thirty-seven and Jay forty-two, and progress seemed assured. If they were not what might be called a successful family, and there is always someone who wants to say that, then they surely were not a failure. They lived in America and were making their way.

  IN THE PART OF Duchess County from which Jay commuted to Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie, there were still large areas of forest, and there were dirt roads that tore a car apart in winter and that in summer were half-grown-over with weeds and hanging brush. Jay lived nearly in the woods, except for the half-acre of lawn around the house, and the long scrubby hillside climbing away to the west. He almost never mowed the lawn, so he lived within a swollen circle of meadow that, from time to time, he engaged someone with a tractor to come and cut. It was a Sunday in June, and he had driven home from morning rounds in his old crimson Alfa-Romeo with the top down. He was wearing khakis with white porch-paint on them, and was even getting some of the paint onto the four fluted pillars at the front of his house. He worked with his back to the hillside forest and the road that went through it, listening to Elgar on the big radio he’d put at the edge of his drippy brush’s reach, beside the cooler in which four Beck’s beer bottles glistened. Paint spattered onto the green V-necked hospital shirt he’d swiped, and it flew onto his chin and, he was sure, up into his five o’clock shadow. One more white hair, he thought, and he smiled charitably at the notion of getting old because—he caught himself and warned himself and kept on smiling anyway—he wasn’t taking his whit
ening whiskers and aging body very seriously at all. I will pay for that, he thought. Janet Baker was singing the Elgar Sea Pictures, and, as her voice soared, he dropped his thought about age and he shouted, in a strong and utterly off-key praying, to accompany the song about horses running on a beach.

  Nell drove up his hill in her very old Jeep, with the big front grille that looked like a sneer. He not only heard her above the music and his own noise, but he saw, in the corner of his vision, the plume of dusty roadbed that she trailed, like smoke, below her. He put the brush down and stood, paint-smeared fingers on his hips, to watch her arrive. He watched her all he could. She was wearing dirty jeans and boots with flat heels and a tank-top knitted shirt, and he thought again that she must have more muscles than he, and yet she looked so smooth at the shoulders. He could see the bones below the neck. Baker rose again; she sounded like a cello. Through her, Jay said, “You have the chest of a bird. I can see all of your bones.”

  Nell grew red, as she often did, but looked down at her body and then shook her head, as if she disapproved. She shrugged and started walking again, and soon she was there. As usual, they didn’t know what to do. She pulled her hair back and refastened the clip that held it in a clump above her neck. Her hair was very close to black, and very fine, and it was always falling down. “You must be wooing me again, to talk like that.”

  He reached to turn the radio off and pulled the cooler to him, across the patch he’d just painted. He handed her a bottle of beer. She nodded and unscrewed the cap and started to drink. He said, “What else? I invited you to marry me, and you declined. I take that very personally.”

  “I would hope so,” she said.

  “It’s a kind of combat,” he said. “Do you remember this from when you were teen-aged? You’d have a crush on someone and they’d be going with somebody else, or they’d just be too obtuse to notice you, and you’d spend most of your time being cruel to them and teasing them and vilifying them because you wanted them to just react? In almost any way at all? Do you remember that? I do. I think I must have done it a lot. Forgive me.”

  She finished the beer too quickly and belched a little. “All right,” she said. “How’s the porch? Oh. Oh, that’s not really good, is it?”

  “Paint’s paint.”

  “Jay, you’re putting latex over enamel. And you haven’t even scraped the enamel. You got paint all over everything. You’re incompetent. No. It’s worse than that. You don’t care about this.”

  He handed her another beer and opened one for himself. The sweat ran down his forehead, and sap beetles whirred slowly in the sun to land on the sticky paint and die there. He heard the tapping of a woodpecker, and a lot of other birds he never bothered to identify: they called, he listened, and that was all he required.

  “And,” she said, frowning, looking too serious, “you got paint on your face, and you got it in your hair—Jay! You got paint all over your goddamned hair.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “No.”

  “Really. Do you like me?”

  “No.”

  “So marry me, then. We’d be the Great American Marriage. Can you tolerate me in small doses?”

  “I don’t think so. No.”

  “Perfect. We can get the blood tests tomorrow. Or I can do them here, heh heh.”

  “Pig. Painting pig. I will not be married to you.”

  Then Jay said, “No. I meant it.”

  She slowly nodded her head.

  “Okay,” he said. “Now tell me what you really think about my paint job.”

  And she did smile, then, so they sat down on the hill below the house, their faces in the sun, and they shared the last bottle of beer while Nell complained, as usual, about the bookstore she ran in Spruce Plains—that she wasn’t bankrupt yet was the best she could report—and Jay described a child in the emergency room, body covered from waist to neck with a deep gouging rash that itched and hurt simultaneously, and that his family physician couldn’t cure. He had remembered the article on gypsy moth larvae as the child’s mother was describing how calamine didn’t stop the discomfort. He’d swabbed the crusted lotion away and rubbed on a topical cortisone cream, explaining that the larvae of gypsy moths produce histamines, and they had set up an allergic reaction in the child, who had run shirtless through chest-high grass where the moths had laid their eggs.

  “Pretty nice, huh?”

  “You’re a good detective,” she said. “I like the way you look for clues. I like the way you enjoy it when you find them.”

  “Me too. It’s the best thing I do. It’s the only fun, really, except when little kids hug me and get better.”

  “You should have children,” she said.

  “And you have one I could use. You want to do a deal with me? Nell, are you listening?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  “Okay. I have no idea what else I should say.”

  She stood and she jumped on him and bore him down. She lay on top of him and kissed him crookedly, half on the mouth and half beneath his nose. Then she pushed off him and left him slanted on his hillside, and she backed her Jeep and drove down the road. He lay there a while and looked up into the light, then he rolled over onto his hands and knees, got up, and walked back up to his porch, where he dipped his brush into the wrong kind of paint and continued to apply it to the unprepared surfaces. He turned the radio on, and the Fountains of Rome played. He smacked the radio hard, and it slid into wet paint. “Baby music,” he said. He took a deep breath and then he apologized to Respighi. I don’t need a baby, he told himself. I have one. He paints my porch. He paints my radio. What I have to find, really, he said to himself, putting the brush into a jar of turpentine that he needed, he realized, for enamel paint, but not for the latex he’d been using, and then pressing down the paint can’s cover to save the wrong paint for the rest of the job, what I have to locate around here is somebody who could pass for an adult.

  He tried his brother, Jonas, who was inside Jay’s house, sitting in the livingroom and reading at old copies of Science and Esquire, sitting in an armless rocker that Jay had stripped but never refinished. Jonas sat as if he were in a waiting room in a country doctor’s house. Jonas wore the trousers to the suit he’d arrived in—it was a blue-and-white Brooks crisp seersucker—and the same black polished penny loafers he had worn last night, and the same wrinkled blue oxford cloth shirt that he now wore rolled to just above the elbows. He was smoking a small cigar with a filter on it, and the air around him was the color of steel. He seemed to derive no pleasure from smoking, but he worked away at it, squinting against the smoke, blowing out as if it all were distasteful to him, but necessary. Maybe it was, Jay thought. Jonas had come in a long, wide Lincoln that matched the light blue of his suit. He had come before Jay was back from his evening with Nell, and he’d been sitting, although the door was unlocked, on the unscraped and as yet unpainted front porch. Buckets and brushes were waiting to be used there, and so was the radio, and Jonas had been sitting against one of the pillars, legs crossed before him, smoke around his face like bugs, listening to jazz on some disc jockey’s dawn patrol. They had said hello while Peggy Lee sang her instructions that some poor sucker had better go out and get her some money like the other men do.

  Inside, though Jay had wanted to sleep, or at least not talk, they had sat up late together. They had drunk beer and had sat in the old shabby kitchen, with its damp sticky surfaces, and ants behind the long rusted sink, and mildew on the wallpaper, gashes in the linoleum—Jay liked to say that he was taking his time in bringing the house up to snuff: he had lived there for seven years—and they’d discussed how Jonas had just run away from home.

  Jay asked, “Did you leave them a note or something? So they’d know you weren’t dead?”

  Jonas shook his head.

  Jay said, “No? You didn’t?”

  Jonas said, “No. I didn’t. Okay?”

  “Did you want to talk to me or what? Because I could go upstairs and
we could sit around and not say anything tomorrow, if you’re busy tonight.”

  Jonas waved his hand at Jay’s temper, then he looked at him. This was something Jay thought lawyers did with juries—the red, wounded little-boy’s eyes, peering into you. Jonas rarely pleaded trials, however, and Jay knew that. Jonas did good research and wrote fine contracts and argued before law referees, but he didn’t go to trial a lot. And, anyway, his eyes this time looked enormous and brown and liquid.

  Jay said, “Is it really busted, you think? The marriage?”

  Jonas shrugged. “Yeah, I think, probably.”

  “And the kids?”

  “They get hurt. You have a war, people get hurt.”

  “Your kids, I mean.”

  “Who do you think I was talking about, Jay? You think I’m doing some kind of routine here?”

  “Ladies and gentlemen: take my wife. Please.”

  “Fuck you, Jay. Okay? Hey. I left one of my kids crying and the other one’s not talking to anyone no more. Any more. Joanne thinks every person who’s a grownup, he’s a, like a traitor. I’m talking like the neighborhood again, you hear me? I’m falling apart here, Jay. I’m already treating my kids like casualties. You do that and they’re your kids once removed. The thing is, you end up, you have to do that. Otherwise, the pain kills you. Your heart stops from it. So you do—you turn your heart down, like a radio. Then it don’t hurt so much. Doesn’t. Will you listen to me? I do some divorces, you know, just for favors. Everybody’s splitting up, and some of them are friends of mine. So I handle it. Every fuckin’ time, you see some kid get broken, like little rocks that a truck rolls over. It’s all the same parts of the kids, but it’s powder. Go put that together again, right? It don’t work. That’s Joanne. Whatever happens, I’m afraid she’s finished. She won’t trust people. And—”