Still Here, Still There

by Richard Bausch

  Richard Bausch

  Richard Bausch is the author of twelve novels and eight previous volumes of short stories. He is a recipient of the REA Award for the Short Story, the PEN/Malamud Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for his novel Peace. He is past Chancellor of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and his work is widely anthologized, including in The Pushcart Prize Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Best American Short Stories, and New Stories from the South. He is on the writing faculty of Chapman University in Orange, California.

  www.richardbausch.com

  BOOKS BY RICHARD BAUSCH

  Novels

  Before, During, After

  Peace

  Thanksgiving Night

  Hello to the Cannibals

  In the Night Season

  Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea

  Rebel Powers

  Violence

  Mr. Field’s Daughter

  The Last Good Time

  Take Me Back

  Real Presence

  Short Fiction

  Living in the Weather of the World

  Something Is Out There

  Wives & Lovers: Three Short Novels

  The Stories of Richard Bausch

  Someone to Watch Over Me: Stories

  Selected Stories of Richard Bausch

  Rare & Endangered Species

  The Fireman’s Wife and Other Stories

  Spirits and Other Stories

  Poetry

  These Extremes: Poems and Prose

  Still Here, Still There

  from Living in the Weather of the World

  by Richard Bausch

  Vintage Shorts

  Vintage Books

  A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

  New York

  Copyright © 2017 by Richard Bausch

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover as part of the collection Living in the Weather of the World in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2017.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for Living in the Weather of the World is available from the Library of Congress.

  Ebook ISBN 9780593314982

  Cover design by Madeline Partner

  Cover photograph © JasonDoiy/E+/Getty Images

  www.vintagebooks.com

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Richard Bausch

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  I

  They were both very old now, and at first neither of them expressed much interest in talking about the war. Robert Marson’s medals—Purple Heart, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Silver Star, from the fighting above Naples—were somewhere in the attic of the old house on Union Avenue in Memphis, where he had lived since 1963, and he didn’t want anybody crawling around up there looking for them. Eugene Schmidt’s Close Combat badge, earned on the Eastern Front in late 1943, had been discarded long ago. They had both raised families, had lived their separate lives, their children were grown and mostly gone or dead. Their wives were dead. They did not like the prospect of traveling.

  But here they were, two surviving soldiers from opposite sides, in Washington, D.C., on this soft springlike July 3, 2016. The Washington Post and NPR had contributed to bringing them together again as part of Independence Day, a small ceremony for the benefit of what Schmidt’s grandson Hans called “the media,” in a tone Marson characterized to his eldest son as being very much like that of somebody speaking about a condition or an era: the flu or the Great Depression.

  The young man, Hans Schmidt, was the one responsible for it all.

  His mother had come to America when she was pregnant with him, and he had been raised in the house of his grandmother’s younger sister, Brigitte. He was studying communications and film at the University of Maryland and had been spending the spring as an intern at the Post. As part of his thesis project he had set up a reunion that he would film. When he mentioned this to an editor, and spoke about how his grandfather, deciding to surrender, had saved the life of a U.S. soldier near Monte Cassino seventy-two years ago, the editor looked up from his turkey sandwich and said, “Wait a minute. Tell me that again?”

  The young man repeated it all.

  “Your grandfather was a Nazi soldier?”

  “He was a German soldier. He lives in Boston now. And the U.S. soldier he saved is also alive. In Memphis but originally he’s from here. From D.C. They’re both alive and well.”

  The editor, whose name was Will Smalley, stared for a second, then picked up his napkin and wiped his mouth. “And the one saved the other.”

  “Yeah. My grandfather. And the other one grew up here in D.C. They were even in touch for a while after the war. They became friendly.”

  Smalley, a unibrowed dark man with bulging eyes and a continual odor of bay rum about his person, leaned back in his chair, smiling. “This’ll be quite a thing if you can bring it off.”

  “I’ve already got it set up.”

  “The Naz—sorry. The German lives in Boston now.”

  “He’s my grandfather, and he was never a Nazi. His name is Eugene Schmidt. A Catholic. When he was a young man he was studying to be a librarian and wasn’t interested in politics. He never had any kind of anti-Semitism, either. He was a kid, you know. He’ll tell you about it. When he got a little older he thought it was a craziness that would go away. Then the talk and the speeches and the sewed-on stars. He went into the war like all the able-bodied men, and he fought in Russia first. Then he was in Italy, where he saved the life of Robert Marson. And yes, he lives with my mother and my grandmother’s sister Brigitte now, in Boston.”

  “And you’re gonna bring him and the American together again.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s the plan.”

  Smalley grinned. “No waiting on this one, right?”

  “In today’s world, sir, they could outlive us both.”

  He looked out the window. “Yeah. Guess you got that right.” On the desk at his elbow was the current issue of a news magazine, with the cover listing names of the dead in the latest mass shooting. “Aren’t you a bit young to have a World War Two veteran for a grandfather?”

  Hans Schmidt nodded, talking. “My grandmother and he met when he was in his fifties. He was fifty-nine when my mother was born. My grandmother was thirty-four. She saved his life, really. He was in bad shape, I guess. I grew up here, but my mother and great-aunt still speak German in the house.”

  “And how old is he now?”

  “Ninety-five.”

  “Damn. And the U.S. soldier, Marson?”

  “Ninety-nine.”

  “Jesus.”

  Hans Schmidt went on: “They actually kept in touch for a time after the war.”

  The editor grinned. “You told me
about this because you knew what I’d do, didn’t you?”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  He opened his cell phone. “I know somebody at NPR. I bet we can defray some of your expenses, son.”

  Hans waited.

  “How’d you come to this, anyway.”

  “I found a couple of old cards my grandfather sent him, to an address on Kearney Street here in D.C. That’s what gave me the idea. I mean at first I thought I’d see about talking to someone in his family. I located his eldest son, Patrick Marson, who lives here, in Arlington. And I found out the old man’s alive and living in Memphis. So I got in touch with him. I just spoke to him again this week.”

  “And he can travel? They can travel?”

  “My grandfather came over here from Ansbach about twelve years ago, after my grandmother passed away. He uses a wheelchair and a walker, but he can get around. Marson doesn’t even need a cane. They’ve both been hesitant about the whole thing, but they’re going to do it.”

  The editor held up one hand and spoke into his cell. “Kaye, I think I’ve got something for you-all.”

  II

  The word friendship describing the two men was inaccurate: they had written back and forth a few times just after the war, and had even met again once, in 1964, when Marson traveled to Naples after the two decades. Eugene Schmidt spoke a fairly rudimentary English—his mother had lived in Leeds for several years as a girl—so they could talk without much difficulty. They drank a bottle of Barolo together, and Schmidt had several snifters of grappa. Alcohol was a problem for Eugene Schmidt at the time, and there was tension as the evening wore on. They parted with frosty politeness, and for some span after that there were widely spaced postcards—birth announcements, holiday wishes, even a wedding invitation. But this had lapsed until Hans had gotten in touch with them.

  The original incident had been reported in the Post just after it happened, in 1944. “Sgt. Robert Marson, 27, Unlikely Rescue.”

  A strong human-interest story even then: an American soldier, on recon patrol, wounded by a mortar round that killed the two men he was with. He saw them die and then got himself out of the ditch they had been in and walked a slow lurching mile in full sight of anyone on either side, bleeding, half blind, seeking some friendly ground, trying to go anywhere but where the mortar rounds were falling, too dazed and numb with shock to take cover. He had collapsed and was only half conscious when he saw the German soldier moving toward him, rifle in hand, all stealth. The American believed that this was his death—this that turned out to be his luckiest chance: a savior from the other side. Because the German, weary, sick of the war, and beginning to see that he did not even want his own country to win, put down his rifle, took the other’s wrist, pulling him to his feet, and, with the arm held over his neck, got him out of the line of fire, to the American lines, and surrendered. Apparently neither man spoke during this. It was only when the German surrendered that Marson heard his voice, repeating as if it were a chant, in heavily accented English, “I hef hed enough.”

  Marson had survived Palermo, Salerno, and Anzio, and the savage attrition around Monte Cassino, and the Liri and Rapido Valleys. He thought his prayers had failed at last, that it was God’s will and this was his last wound.

  In the years just after his return home, telling others the story, he spoke of the enormous sense of peace that came over him when, opening his eyes briefly out of the swoon, he saw the enemy coming near and understood that this would be his death. In the following ten or twelve years, whenever he had dreams about that day, even knowing the happy outcome, he still woke shaking, in a sweat.

  It was all so long ago, now. And it was still, in its way, confusing.

  His wife, Helen, had saved the clipping for their children: two daughters—the elder was gone, in a terrible car crash in 1974, when he was fifty-seven—and three sons. Helen was gone, too. Patrick, the eldest of his grown sons, was the only one who lived near enough to see once in a while. The other offspring were in Oregon and Kyoto, Japan. The remaining daughter, Noreen, taught English in an American school in Japan. The two younger sons ran a bike–and–Jet Ski–rental shop in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where they lived together in a kind of boathouse on the water.

  He visited the boys once, on his ninetieth birthday. He took a first-class flight to Portland, where they met him. He wanted to show them that he could still get around on his own. And if he could do it, take the trouble to visit, so could they. But they stayed where they were. They did not get along with him well enough to visit. He had grown cantankerous. You tended to, over time. You had aches and trouble sleeping and memories that hurt, even when they were good memories—maybe especially when the memories were good. It was not for sissies, this life. He had said it many times. You did not get old being any kind of sissy. He had seen and been through very many awful things, and grief was the weather all the time, even as you were happy to see the sun rise in the morning.

  He had talked about this some with Schmidt’s grandson, and what a surprise that Schmidt was still living. All the years. He told the boy, “I have outgrown my own life.” He meant it as a joke. He could joke. Helen was gone thirty-one years—thirty-one years this August. Barbara, the eldest child, forty-two years ago. The little girl in the picture he carried in the cigarette tin, in Italy. Seventy years, seventy years. And she only got to be thirty-one. There were her two children. His second daughter, Noreen, had five. They had, every one of them, gone off in all directions with time. Though Noreen had called to say she was flying home from Japan for a visit with her daughter Monica, in Atlantic City, and the two of them would make their way south to D.C. for the event.

  “I don’t know how much of an event it’s gonna be,” Marson said.

  “Well, Monica wants to see whatever it’ll be, and so do I.”

  “The fireworks on the Fourth of July don’t upset me anymore,” he surprised himself by telling her. “You know, I used to plug my ears with cotton around that holiday.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “Your mother kept all that stuff from you guys.”

  III

  Patrick met him at Reagan National on the afternoon of the third. From the airport, he drove to Brookland—the old house, 1236 Kearney Street NE. It was a whim, he told his father. He wanted to see it. That was Patrick, with his obsessions about the past. Marson was tired from the journey but decided to endure it for him. He had not been there since 1963 and was sure it would be unrecognizable. And withal, he felt a thin, nostalgic curiosity about it, like a man courting some sort of dangerous thrill. Surprisingly, it was still there. It had been completely remodeled, of course, and looked brand-new, not much like its old self: the two floors and the gabled roof, the porch, the tall narrowness of it. The street was even more thickly overladen with trees and shrubbery, the lawns perfectly tended; it all looked very exclusive and expensive. “We used to play horseshoes in the side yard,” Marson said almost to himself. “It was a working-class neighborhood.”

  “Every house has been redone. It’s an exclusive neighborhood, now.”

  There was a white swing on the porch, big oak trees flanking the place, with its bright blue façade. A child’s bike stood in a shaft of sun at the bottom of the porch steps. Everything seemed perfectly still. He looked at the street. “Right there,” he said, pointing. “Your grandfather stood and watched me go off in a taxi to the train station and the war.” He looked at the house again. “Your mother was pregnant with Barbara. She and your aunt Mary and your uncle Jack stood there, waving. From that porch. That very porch. It’s amazing that it’s still there. My God.”

  Patrick was silent.

  “Your mother’s old place?”

  “Torn down a long time ago. I drove over there for a dance recital of a friend of mine. There’s a run-down apartment building there now.”

  Marson put the back of his hand to his lips and
wiped across. For a moment he felt this street as it was then. The Surround, as he had thought of it. His place in the world. And it was gone, truly, someone else’s now probably far longer than it was ever his. But he had grown up there. He said, “ ’S’a short trip through here.”

  His son sighed. “I remember you telling us that.”

  “Now you know.”

  They were quiet for a time. He was experiencing a heaviness in his chest, the signature of grief for him his whole life. “Nothing here anymore,” he got out, then cleared his throat. “Well, we all have to make room for somebody else. That’s what your mother used to say.”

  His son stared at him.

  “Glad these folks have it, whoever they are.”

  “I remember the long backyard. And the horseshoe pit.”

  “You were ten.”

  “I remember it.”

  “Eight years later we were in Memphis.”

  “I hated it at first.”

  “I was forty-six and I knew then it was my last house.”

  “Maybe on Sunday I could drive you across the river, and you could see my new apartment.”

  “Maybe. I’m tired, Son.”

  Patrick drove him to the hotel, where Noreen and Monica would meet them the following morning. Patrick, at seventy-one, was unmarried and would stay in the hotel room with him. Since there probably wouldn’t be time to visit the new apartment he’d just bought, a rooftop corner unit with a wraparound window overlooking the street, Patrick took the trouble to describe it. He was clearly excited about this visit, and Marson strove to be up for it all. Then Patrick began talking about all the publicity around his father and the old German. He had never lost the penchant for artless enthusiasms. TV! Radio! And, as was his nature, he voiced the obvious: that the human-interest element of the story was much stronger today because Marson and Eugene Schmidt had both survived so long.