Still Here, Still There

by Richard Bausch

  “She was unconscious most of the way.”

  “Feigning sleep so as not to have to talk.” Monica was forty, separated, childless, a psychologist with a healthy practice. Marson kissed her on the cheek and hugged Noreen.

  “You haven’t seen him yet?” Monica asked in a tone near reverence.

  “No.”

  “It must be so strange to think about.”

  “The grandson seems nice,” Patrick said. “An average American kid.”

  “NPR,” Noreen said. “Congressmen. Maybe the president.”

  “No,” said Marson.

  They went together down to the mezzanine restaurant and sat talking quietly over breakfast. It struck Marson that they looked like a family at a reunion. And so it was, in its way. He turned to Monica and smiled, drawing her out of her lethargy.

  “Tell me about your life.”

  “Life is good,” she said, and smiled.

  “How are your studies?” Marson asked, and realized that she was long past that. He shook his head and muttered, “Forgive me.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll never stop studying.”

  “You’re very thoughtful,” he said.

  “You don’t seem so grouchy.”

  “Monica!” Noreen exclaimed.

  “What?” Marson’s granddaughter turned to him and grinned. “You never minded frankness before, right, Granddad?”

  He nodded. She looked so much like her father, who was blond and delicate featured.

  “I remember,” she went on, “Mom’s story about how you’d walk into the middle of the living room while everyone was talking and being funny, and drinking, and you’d stretch real big and then yawn and say, ‘Oh, God, I’m glad I’m home. I sure wish you all were.’ ”

  They all laughed. They all remembered him. And he had been that person. He could remember that, too.

  “I can’t imagine coming face-to-face with the man who saved your life,” Monica said. “I’ll be awful happy to make his acquaintance.”

  “In a way, they saved each other,” Patrick said.

  “I don’t think he sees it that way,” Marson told him. “And as a matter of fact, neither do I.” He got himself up, putting his arm out to fend off Patrick’s. “I’m fine. Just have to use the restroom.”

  They all watched him start toward the entrance to the hall, and then turned to their own concerns, Patrick asking about whether or not there could be some expectation of the brothers showing up or any of the other grandchildren. Marson went straight, past the opening to the hall, to the balcony railing. From here, you could see all of the high-ceilinged lobby below and the doorway out onto the street. He put his hands on the smooth metal railing and leaned slightly, watching people move back and forth to the front desk. It was a busy place. The coffee he’d had seemed to have gone immediately to his heart, which was rushing as it always did with caffeine. Behind him, he could hear the women going on again, teasing about the sniping they had done at each other during their early morning drive down from New Jersey. He turned, looked at them, walked slowly back, and took his place at the table. Here they were, in life on earth. They walked the earth because of something a tired, scared, hungry German soldier had done on an impulse, something last ditch, not even thought out, borne of exhaustion. He himself felt suddenly exhausted. He wanted to go back up to the room and lie down. Noreen walked over and sat next to him. “What’re you feeling about this event?”

  “I didn’t want to come,” he told her. “And then I did want to.”

  She said, “I was something like fifteen when you and Mom went to Naples that time. I remember you were nervous about meeting the guy.”

  “I was always nervous about everything back then,” he told her.

  “I remember feeling scared, seeing my father so shaky.”

  “I don’t think I was shaky.”

  Patrick said, “I just remember you and Mom being glad to fly to Italy.”

  “I saw things in Italy,” Marson said, and felt suddenly a little sick to his stomach. The feeling astonished him, though he understood it as it took hold of him. He sipped the coffee and listened to them talk about Helen, and of Barbara’s death.

  “What is it,” Monica said. “Forty years?”

  “Forty-two,” said Marson. “In September.” He saw the long, dimly lit upstairs hallway of the house in Memphis, and himself walking it, toward the bedroom, where Helen sat on the edge of the bed, hands on her thighs, waiting to find out who had called at that hour of the morning.

  “Oh, God, what is it?” she said, seeing him standing in the doorway.

  Twenty-two minutes after three o’clock in the morning.

  There was a reason you possessed all the things you gathered around you in the days. There was a reason for being too busy all the time, and falling into bed too tired to think.

  He sat there having this thought. Ridiculous. Of course it was completely absurd. One hundred years of all that, and the going around and the coming back. His mind seemed to be faltering, folding in on itself. A man should keep to his daily routines and not dwell in the country of remembering. Where had he seen that? Who had said it?

  “Forty-two years,” Noreen said now. “Doesn’t seem that long.”

  “I carried her picture in that little cigarette tin,” Marson said. “A baby.”

  She reached over and put her hand on his shoulder. “Dad.”

  “That was more than seventy years ago, in Italy.”

  They were all quiet a moment.

  He had seen so much of death. How many years since he had looked at the memory of John Deal and Tolly Miller. The two dead men whom he had crawled and then walked away from. All of that. The thing he would be talking about soon, with Eugene Schmidt. “Memory loss is sometimes a good thing,” he said to Noreen.

  “I know.”

  “The things you must be carrying around,” Patrick said, as if paying some sort of tribute. “Next to you, I don’t have any memories that qualify.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Bad memories,” Patrick said. “Trauma.”

  “I haven’t thought about the war for long time. A very long time. It’s always been there, though.” He touched his finger to his breastbone. “Here, I mean.”

  He saw the two men, John Deal, whom everyone called Square because he gave everyone a square deal, and they had teased him about buying a used-car dealership, and Tolly Miller, who one day had picked up a miserable, rain-sodden stray cat and put it under his field jacket, thinking to get it warm and dry, and the cat went crazy, scratching to get out, caught between the folds of the jacket and Miller’s body, Miller gyrating and turning and falling down and rolling in the muddy lane trying to get his jacket open so the cat could escape. Miller’s body. And he, Robert Marson, almost one hundred years old, had lived all this time, and sold cars himself for thirty years, and kept customers and acquaintances and friends entertained with stories, like the funny memory of the cat and the friend wriggling in the mud, even as that very memory was woven, under the surface of his talk, behind his smile, into the moment, one day later, of the white flash and the thudding that none of them knew was an exploding mortar round. And he always saw it again, as he saw it now. Tolly Miller’s headless body there in the ditch, soaked by the fountain of blood from his neck. He saw John Deal staring, sitting with his legs under him, his entire peritoneal sac in his cupped hands. Deal kept screaming from what had happened to Miller. Deal did not know what he was holding in his hands. Deal looked at Marson as Marson reached screaming for him, and then Deal looked down at himself, and quickly back at Marson, and said one thing: “Don’t.”

  Always there. Always just behind the flow of living and being and dreaming and going on in time. Never very far away, and he wanted to say it out loud, as if addressing the two men, “I didn’t mean to forget.
I didn’t mean to let it go.”

  “Dad?” Noreen said, staring, concerned.

  His family was waiting for him to continue, and when he didn’t, Patrick said, “You never really talked about it, Dad.”

  “No.”

  “Think you’ll be talking about it today?”

  Marson did not answer. But shrugged slightly after a pause.

  “This must be hard for you.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Under the circumstances, I guess you’ll have to talk about it, now.”

  “Do you think he’s having the same onrush of memories?” Monica asked him.

  Such a perceptive girl. Woman. “I don’t know. The last time I saw him—” He left off.

  “Mom came home that time pretty upset about things, as I recall,” said Noreen.

  “At me? You don’t—”

  “No, for you. You went to see this guy who saved your life, after twenty years, and it was a disappointment to you. She never liked to see you unhappy. You know that, Dad.”

  He was silent, squeezing the napkin under the table, watching them talk about Helen, and how it had been, growing up in his house, his and Helen’s house. Oh, Lord, let me get through this and I’ll raise a big family, he had prayed. It would be thirty-one years August 4.

  It was all too much.

  Helen, eleven years after Barbara, coming to him in that bedroom in Memphis and lifting her too-thin arm, pointing back to the bathroom, saying, “I just lost a lot of blood in there.”

  “Do you want me to call an ambulance?” he had said, sitting up in the bed.

  “No.” She climbed in next to him. “Just hold me a little while.”

  So he cradled her, breathed the slightly sour odor of her hair, which had thinned so much. “You know I love you,” he said to her, patting the bony shoulder. She had lost so much weight, and the doctors could not find anything wrong. Eleven years of a broken heart. And why had he lived so long? Why had he, Robert Marson, lived so very long? That last night with her, he murmured, “You all right?”

  “I’m dying,” Helen said. Then, a moment later, reaching across him: “Hand me that pillow.” And she was gone. And he knew it. He held her, crying softly, because she had wanted to go, sixty-seven years old, but she had been so tired, raising Barbara’s children, so tired. And she had simply sighed away from him, lying there, and this was worse than any wound in the war, any terror or anguish he had ever suffered in the war. Barbara, the first, and Helen.

  Patrick was talking to Noreen and Monica about the ceremony to come. “It’s still kind of disorganized, really.”

  They were watching him, though. He held up one hand as if to reassure them. But it seemed aimless, he knew, not quite coming from conscious thought. He had been religious his whole life, and they had been, too. Through all the catastrophes, but in these last few years even that had atrophied some. It offered no solace. He looked into each of their faces and felt suddenly like a stranger; for a second, he did not know them.

  “So he’s ninety-five,” Patrick said to Noreen. “And imagine. He’s been living in Boston.”

  “I know all that,” said Noreen. “We talked about it on the phone.”

  “I wonder if he’s still a drunk,” said Monica and her mother shushed her with a quick gesture.

  So Helen had confided in Noreen about that last time, and now obviously Noreen had told Monica. The story had entered his family’s lore, then. How could he have missed it?

  “I’m sorry,” said his psychologist granddaughter, who believed so much in talk.

  “It’s all right,” he said to her.

  During the long hours of that day in 1964 when the two men had met after two decades, he noticed alcohol on the other’s breath first thing in the morning and thought it must be some sort of mouthwash. Almost immediately the German boasted with a rough nudge of his elbow in Marson’s side that the lovely young woman who had accompanied him to Italy was die Metze, a paid escort. He went on to relate how his first wife had never liked sex and had come from society, how she had left him while he was in the hospital, suffering from TB, and this was why he wanted nothing more to do with gesellschaft Frauen, women of social standing, glancing with this last remark at Helen, as if she would certainly understand him. Then later, that evening after dinner—after endless talk and self-congratulation about being the American’s savior (so much so that Marson began counting references to it, as if the man were trying to justify the whole thing to himself)—after the glasses of wine and the shots of grappa, Schmidt went on about what he drunkenly called his true first experience with love, someone named Elise, who had been in the bombing of Berlin as a girl and was only eighteen when he met her and loved to have sex, no matter with whom, boys and girls, he said, glancing at Helen’s neckline more and more often as he spoke. Marson realized that the German had indeed been drunk all day, and when the time came to get up and leave, he came very close to striking him.

  Even so, he had kept the connection for a few years, at Helen’s insistence, because in fact Marson would not have survived that day were it not for the other soldier. If Schmidt hadn’t decided to surrender, then certainly—there was no denying it—he would have killed Robert Marson.

  That was true. That was the thing.

  “His grandson, Hans, is a nice young man,” Patrick said. “We’ve both talked to him.”

  “A nice young man,” Marson told them, merely to be talking.

  “How does the guy end up here?” Monica asked.

  “His mother came to Boston when she was pregnant with him,” said Patrick.

  “No, I mean the old—the soldier.”

  Marson looked at his son. “I’m not sure.”

  “His wife died,” Patrick said. “And his wife’s sister agreed to take him in. She’d already taken in his daughter. The boy’s mother.”

  “When did his wife—” Marson began.

  “Years ago. Hans talked about it. The wife was only fifty-nine.”

  They were all quiet again. Marson saw himself holding Helen, saw the room they were in, and heard her cigarette-deepened voice utter his name….

  He looked at Noreen and sought for something to say to her. “You hear from your brothers?”

  “Oh, you know. They’re thrilled about it all. They’ve had something planned for months.”

  Marson nodded, holding on inside.

  Other people wandered in and were seated. An empty buffet table stood along one wall, with a coffee machine set up on one end of it. Two men were there making coffee. The woman who had come in with them walked over. She went up to Marson. “Are you one of the two old soldiers?”

  Marson stared at her, then nodded.

  She smiled and pulled a chair over and sat down. She had reddish-brown hair knotted tightly on top of her head and eyebrows that had been shaved and then painted on in a different arc. You could see where they should have been on her face, and the difference was disconcerting. “We heard about it, of course. We’re with the City Journal. I wondered if you’d want to talk to us.”

  The two men walked over with their coffee. They were both thin, with boylike faces. The tall one had brown teeth. He was the one smiling.

  “I don’t think I have time to talk just now,” Marson said to them. “Have you been in touch with these other people? The ones from the Post and NPR?”

  “Well, we all got a press release, you know.”

  The one with the brown teeth said, “Who you gonna vote for?”

  After a pause, Marson said, “I don’t ever share that, sonny.”

  The other man, who could not have been much beyond five feet tall, was florid faced, cheeks the color of a bruise, as if he were made up for some kind of stage role. He said, “The Republican candidate, I’ll bet, right?”

  Marson stood, and reached out for Patrick. “Isn’
t it time to go down to Schmidt’s room?”

  Patrick was signing for the breakfast. Noreen walked over and said, “Excuse me, please—this is a private breakfast with my father. But I will tell you he’s a lifelong Democrat.”

  Monica, still sitting with arms folded, said, quietly and evenly, “And fuck the Republican candidates. You can quote me.”

  Robert Marson was taken aback. But he smiled. “My granddaughter, gentlemen.” Then he looked at the woman. “And lady.”

  “She’s got quite a mouth on her, doesn’t she,” said the florid-faced man.

  Monica said, “Oh, I do, don’t I? And you’re a little purple motherfucker.”

  The three people simply stood there as Marson and his daughter and son and granddaughter left the restaurant. As they got into the elevator to go down, Noreen said, “Monica, that’s it, all right? None of that stuff with these people we’re going to see.”

  “Sorry, Granddad,” Monica said.

  “No need,” said Marson, remembering almost with embarrassment how he had felt when the men around him used that language during the war. “No worries,” he said to her.

  “But not again,” said Noreen.

  “I know the City Journal people, Mom. They have a big presence on Facebook. Jerks. Political trolls.” She took hold of Marson’s arm. “Believe me, Granddad. They’re a bunch of smug assholes.”

  “Monica.”

  “I’m with her,” Marson said, forcing a smile at Noreen. “Honor bright.”

  VIII

  In the thronged white hotel room with the paintings of stick figures in something burning on the walls, Marson, feeling hemmed in, offered to shake hands with Eugene Schmidt, who was seated between his grandson and a man in a powder-blue suit. Shaking hands seemed the logical thing to do in the circumstance, with everyone staring at them, and the camera rolling. Schmidt lifted his bony hand and let it be taken. “Old fighter,” Marson said to him, and evidently no one else heard it. Schmidt said, “Ja. Ve hef done ziss.”

  “Speak louder,” Kaye said in a singsong tone, as if she didn’t really mean it.