The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “It’s the wind,” Charles said.

  She looked at him. “My ministering angel.”

  “Mom,” he said.

  Now she looked out the window. “Your father would be proud of you now.” She bowed her head slightly, fumbling with her purse, and then she was crying. She held the handkerchief to her nose, and the tears dropped down over her hand.

  “Mom,” he said, reaching for her wrist.

  She withdrew from him a little. “No, you don’t understand.”

  “Let’s go,” Charles said.

  “I don’t think I could stand to be home now, Charles. Not on Christmas. Not this Christmas.”

  Charles paid the check and then went back to the table to help her into her coat. “Goddamn Lois,” she said, pulling the furry collar up to cover her ears.

  “Tell me about your girlfriend,” Aunt Lois said. He shrugged this off.

  They were sitting in the kitchen, breaking up bread for the dressing, while Marie napped on the sofa in the living room. Aunt Lois had brought the turkey out and set it on the counter. The meat deep in its breast still had to thaw, she told Charles. She was talking just to talk. Things had been very cool since the morning, and Charles was someone to talk to.

  “Won’t even tell me her name?”

  “I’m not really going with anybody,” he said.

  “A handsome boy like you.”

  “Aunt Lois, could we talk about something else?”

  She said, “All right. Tell me what you did all fall.”

  “I took care of the house.”

  “Did you read any good books or see any movies or take anybody out besides your mother?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Okay, tell me about it.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “I want to know what you did all fall.”

  “What is this?” Charles said.

  She spoke quickly. “I apologize for prying. I won’t say another word.”

  “Look,” he said, “Aunt Lois, I’m not keeping myself from anything right now. I couldn’t have concentrated in school in September.”

  “I know,” she said, “I know.” There was a long silence.

  “I wonder if it’s too late for me to get married and have a bunch of babies,” she said suddenly. “I think I’d like the noise they’d make.”

  That night, they watched Christmas specials. Charles dozed in the lounge chair by the fireplace, a magazine on his lap, and the women sat on the sofa. No one spoke. On television, celebrities sang old Christmas songs, and during the commercials other celebrities appealed to the various yearnings for cheer and happiness and possessions, and the thrill of giving. In a two-hour cartoon with music and production numbers, Scrooge made his night-long journey to wisdom and love; the Cratchits were portrayed as church mice. Aunt Lois remarked that this was cute, and no one answered her. Charles feigned sleep. When the news came on, Aunt Lois turned the television off, and they said good night. Charles kissed them both on the cheek, and went to his room. For a long while after he lay down, he heard them talking low. They had gone to Aunt Lois’s room. He couldn’t distinguish words, but the tones were chilly and serious. He rolled over on his side and punched the pillow into shape and stared at the faint outline of trees outside the window, trying not to hear. The voices continued, and he heard his mother’s voice rising, so that he could almost make out words now. His mother said something about last summer, and then both women were silent. A few moments later, Aunt Lois came marching down the hall past his door, on into the kitchen, where she opened cabinets and slammed them, and ran water. She was going to make coffee, she said, when Marie called to her. If she wanted a cup of coffee in her own house at any hour of the night she’d have coffee.

  Charles waited a minute or so, then got up, put his robe on, and went in to her. She sat at the table, arms folded, waiting for the water to boil.

  “It’s sixty dollars for a good Christmas tree,” she said. “A ridiculous amount of money.”

  Charles sat down across from her.

  “You’re just like your father,” she said, “you placate. And I think he placated your mother too much—that’s what I think.”

  He said, “Come on, Aunt Lois.”

  “Well, she makes me so mad, I can’t help it. She doesn’t want to go home and she doesn’t want to stay here and she won’t listen to the slightest suggestion about you or the way you’ve been nursemaiding her for four months. And she’s just going to stay mad at me all week. Now, you tell me.”

  “I just wish everybody would calm down,” Charles said.

  She stood and turned her back to him and set about making her coffee.

  According to the medical report, Charles’s father had suffered a massive coronary occlusion, and death was almost instantaneous; it could not have been attended with much pain. Perhaps there had been a second’s recognition, but little more than that. The doctor wanted Charles and his mother to know that the speed with which an attack like that kills is a blessing. In his sleep, Charles heard the doctor’s voice saying this, and then he was watching his father fall down on the sidewalk outside the restaurant; people walked by and stared, and Charles looked at their faces, the faces of strangers.

  He woke trembling in the dark, the only one awake on Christmas Eve morning. He lay on his side, facing the window, and watched the dawn arrive, and at last someone was up, moving around in the kitchen.

  It was his mother. She was making coffee. “You’re up early,” she said.

  “I dreamed about Dad.”

  “I dream about him too,” she said. She opened the refrigerator. “Good God, there’s a leg of lamb in here. Where did this come from? What in the world is that woman thinking of? The turkey’s big enough for eight people.”

  “Maybe it’s for tomorrow.”

  “And don’t always defend her, either, Charles. She’s not infallible, you know.”

  “I never said she was.”

  “None of them—your father wasn’t. I mean—” she closed the refrigerator and took a breath. “He wouldn’t want you to put him on a pedestal.”

  “I didn’t,” Charles said.

  “People are people,” she said. “They don’t always add up.”

  This didn’t seem to require a response.

  “And I’ve known Lois since she was seventeen years old. I know how she thinks.”

  “I’m not defending anybody,” he said, “I’m just the one in between everything here. I wish you’d both just leave me out of it.”

  “Go get dressed,” she said. “Nobody’s putting you in between anybody.”

  “Mom.”

  “No—you’re right. I won’t involve you. Now really, go get dressed.” She looked as though she might begin to cry again. She patted him on the wrist and then went back to the refrigerator. “I wanted something in here,” she said, opening it. There were dark blue veins forking over her ankles. She looked old and thin and afraid and lonely, and he turned his eyes away.

  The three Of them went to shop for a tree. Charles drove. They looked in three places and couldn’t agree on anything, and when it began to rain Aunt Lois took matters into her own hands. She made them wait in the car while she picked out the tree she wanted for what was, after all, her living room. They got the tree home, and had to saw off part of the trunk to get it up, but when it was finished, ornamented and wound with popcorn and tinsel, they all agreed that it was a handsome tree—a round, long-needled pine that looked like a jolly rotund elf, with its sawed-off trunk and its top listing slightly to the left under the weight of a tinfoil star. They turned its lights on and stood admiring it, and for a while there was something of the warmth of other Christmases in the air. Work on the decorations, and all the cooperation required to get everything accomplished seemed to have created a kind of peace between the two women. They spent the early part of the evening wrapping presents for the morning, each in his own room with his gifts for the others, and then Aunt Lois put the television o
n, and went about her business, getting the dinner ready. She wanted no help from anyone, she said, but Marie began to help anyway, and Aunt Lois did nothing to stop her. Charles sat in the lounge chair and watched a parade. It was the halftime of a football game, but he was not interested in it, and soon he had begun to doze again. He sank deep, and there were no dreams, and then Aunt Lois was telling him to wake up. “Charles,” she said, “they’re here.” He sat forward in the chair, a little startled, and Aunt Lois laughed. “Wake up, son,” she said. Charles saw a man standing by the Christmas tree, smiling at him. Another man sat on the sofa, his legs spread a little to make room for his stomach; he looked blown up, his neck bulging over the collar of his shirt.

  “Charles,” Aunt Lois said, indicating the man on the sofa, “this is Mr. Rainy.”

  Mr. Rainy was smiling in an almost imbecilic way, not really looking at anyone.

  “This is Charles,” Aunt Lois said to him.

  They shook hands. “Nice to meet you,” Mr. Rainy said. He had a soft, high-pitched voice.

  “And this is Mr. Downs.”

  Charles looked at him, took the handshake he offered. Bill Downs was tall and a little stooped, and he seemed very uneasy. He looked around the room, and his hands went into his pockets and then flew up to his hair, which was wild-looking and very sparse.

  “Marie will be out any time, I’m sure,” Aunt Lois said in a voice that, to Charles at least, sounded anything but sure. “In the meantime, can I get anybody a drink?”

  No one wanted anything right away. Mr. Rainy had brought two bottles of champagne, which Aunt Lois took from him and put on ice in the kitchen. The two men sat on the sofa across from Charles, and the football game provided them with something to look at. Charles caught himself watching Bill Downs, and thinking about how his mother had once felt something for him. It was hard to picture them together, as it was hard not to stare at the man, at his skinny hands, never still in the long-legged lap, and the nervous way he looked around the room. He did not look past forty years old, except for the thinning hair.

  “You boys get your football watching before dinner,” Aunt Lois said, coming back into the room. “I won’t have it after we begin to eat.”

  “I’m not much of a football fan,” Bill Downs said.

  Charles almost blurted out that his father had loved football. He kept silent. In the next moment, Marie made her entrance. It struck Charles exactly that way: that it was an entrance, thoroughly dramatic and calculated to have an effect. It was vivacious in a nervous, almost automatic way. She crossed the room to kiss him on the forehead and then she turned to face the two men on the sofa. “Bill, you haven’t changed a bit.”

  Downs was clambering over himself to get to his feet. “You either, Marie.”

  “Merry Christmas,” Mr. Rainy said, also trying to rise. “Oh, don’t get up,” Marie was saying.

  Charles sat in his chair and watched them make their way through the introductions and the polite talk before dinner. He watched his mother, mostly. He knew exactly what she was feeling, understood the embarrassment and the nervousness out of which every gesture and word came, and yet something in him hated her for it, felt betrayed by it. When she went with the two men into the kitchen to open one of the bottles of champagne, he got out of the chair and faced Aunt Lois, whose expression seemed to be saying “Well?” as if this were only what one should have expected. He shook his head, and she said, “Come on.”

  They went into the kitchen. Marie was leaning against the counter with a glass of champagne in her hand. Charles decided that he couldn’t look at her. She and Bill Downs were talking about the delicious smell of the turkey.

  “I didn’t have Thanksgiving dinner this year,” Mr. Rainy was saying. “You know, I lost my wife. I just didn’t feel like anything, you know.”

  “This is a hard time of year,” Aunt Lois said.

  “I simply don’t know how to act anymore,” Mr. Rainy said.

  Charles backed quietly away from them. He took himself to the living room and the television, where everyone seemed to know everyone else. They were all celebrating Christmas on television, and then the football game was on again. Charles got into his coat and stepped out onto the porch, intending at first just to take a few deep breaths, to shake if he could this feeling of betrayal and anger that had risen in him. It was already dark. The rain had turned to mist again. When the wind blew, cold drops splattered on the eaves of the porch. The cars and trucks racing by on the overpass at the end of the block seemed to traverse a part of the sky. Charles moved to the steps of the porch, and behind him the door opened. He turned to see his mother, who came out after glancing into the house, apparently wanting to be sure they would be alone. She wasn’t wearing her coat, and he started to say something about the chill she would get when the expression on her face stopped him.

  “What do you expect from me, Charles?”

  He couldn’t speak for a moment.

  She advanced across the porch, already shivering. “What am I supposed to do?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, God.” She paced back and forth in front of him, her arms wrapped around herself. Somewhere off in the misty dark, a group of people were singing carols. The voices came in on a gust of wind, and when the wind died they were gone. “God,” she said again. Then she muttered, “Christmas.”

  “I wish it was two years ago,” Charles said suddenly.

  She had stopped pacing. “It won’t ever be two years ago, and you’d better get used to that right now.”

  Charles was silent.

  “You’re turning what you remember into a paradise,” she said, “and I’ve helped you get a good start on it.”

  “I’m not,” Charles said, “I’m not doing that at all. I remember the way it was last summer when I wasn’t—when I couldn’t do anything and he couldn’t make me do anything, and you and he were so different with each other—” He halted. He wasn’t looking at her.

  “Go on,” she said.

  He said, “Nothing.”

  “What went on between your father and me is nobody’s business.”

  “I didn’t say it was.”

  “It had nothing to do with you, Charles.”

  “All right,” he said.

  She was shivering so hard now that her voice quavered when she spoke. “I wish I could make it all right, but I can’t.”

  Charles reached for her, put his arms around her, and she cried into the hollow of his shoulder. They stood that way for a while, and the wind blew and again there was the sound of the carolers.

  “Mom,” Charles said, “he was going to leave us, wasn’t he.”

  She removed herself, produced a handkerchief from somewhere in her skirt, and touched it to her nose, still trembling, staring down. Then she breathed out as if something had given way inside her, and Charles could see that she was gathering herself, trying not to show whatever it was that had just gone through her. When she raised her eyes she gave him the softest, the kindest look. “Not you,” she said. Then: “Don’t think such things.” She turned from him, stepped up into the doorway, and the light there made a willowy shadow of her. “Don’t stay out here too long, son. Don’t be rude.”

  When she had closed the door, he walked down the street to the overpass and stood below it, his hands deep in his coat pockets. It wasn’t extremely cold out yet, but he was cold. He was cold, and he shook, and above him the traffic whooshed by. He turned and faced the house, beginning to cry now, and a sound came out of him that he put his hands to his mouth to stop. When a car came along the road he ducked back into the deeper shadow of the overpass, but he had been seen. The car pulled toward him, and a policeman shined a light on him.

  “What’re you doing there, fella?”

  “Nothing,” Charles said. “My father died.”

  The policeman kept the light on him for a few seconds, then turned it off. He said, “Go on home, son,” and drove away.r />
  Charles watched until the taillights disappeared in the mist. It was quiet; even the traffic on the overpass had ceased for a moment. The police car came back, slowing as it passed him, then going on, and once more it was quiet. He turned and looked at the house with its Christmas tree shimmering in the window, and in that instant it seemed to contain only the light and tangle of adulthood; it was their world, so far from him. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands, beginning to cry again. No, it wasn’t so far. It wasn’t so far at all. Up the street, Aunt Lois opened her door and called his name. But she couldn’t see him, and he didn’t answer her.

  CONTRITION

  My sister only tolerates me here, I’m afraid. She doesn’t want to talk about anything much; everything I do is a strain on her. This morning, I wanted to ask if she remembers a photograph of our father. “We used to stare at it and try to imagine him,” I say. “I used to carry it around with me—the one Uncle Raymond took with that old box camera of his.”

  “I don’t remember staring at any photograph,” she says.

  I follow her around the house, talking. I remember that I used to gaze at that one picture, though there were others—there must’ve been others—trying to imagine myself into the scene, trying to imagine how it must have been on that day when the picture was taken.

  “You have Mother’s things in the attic, don’t you?” I say.

  “I don’t have the photograph.”

  “I’m sure Mother would’ve kept it,” I say.

  “We’ll talk tonight,” my sister says. “If you want to talk. But not about any photographs or anything like that. You’ve got to get up and start again.”

  “Do you remember the picture exactly?” I say.

  “I remember that you’ve been here a week and haven’t had one job interview.”

  “It’s hard for a man my age—a convicted felon.”

  “Stop it,” she says. “Quit bringing it up all the time.”

  “Maybe I’ll go for a walk,” I say.

  And she says, “We can talk about things tonight.”