The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “I knew the first wives.”

  “Is that why they fell from grace? Because they had divorces?”

  “They fell from grace, as you put it, because they were messy and selfish about their lives and because they never had a thought for me or their mother.”

  “Do you know what John thought about the whole thing?”

  “I don’t care what John thought about the whole thing.”

  “He thought we stayed in your good graces because we kept everything about ourselves a secret—you never knew what trouble we had.”

  She was a registered nurse specializing in pediatrics, and she was mostly on morning shifts, so he would say he liked that time the best: he would leave the phone off the hook and lie in bed reading the newspapers until his eyes hurt. Then he would get up and fix himself an egg, a piece of toast. By this time the sun would be high. He would pour himself a tumblerful of whiskey and take it out on the front porch to sit in his wicker chair in the warmth and sip the whiskey until it was gone. The sun warmed his skin; the whiskey warmed his bones. Before him was the street, what traffic there was; it all looked as though it moved behind smoked glass. If he was really relaxed, he might doze off. It would be shady now, past noon. He would drift, and dream, and in the dreams he was always doing something quite ordinary, like working in the yard, or sitting in the shade of a porch, dreaming. When he woke up he would have a little more of the whiskey, to get ready, he told himself, for her arrival.

  Today he went out back to talk over the fence, as he sometimes did, to his one acquaintance in the neighborhood, who was twenty years his junior, and a very bad hypochondriac. It made him feel good talking to this poor man, so beaten down by his own dire expectations. And it was good to know that Judy wouldn’t find him on the porch, half asleep, out of dignity for the day, an old, dozing man. He looked at the mess in the kitchen on his way through, and felt a little rush of glee as if this were part of a game he was winning. His neighbor sat in a lawn chair with a newspaper in his lap; he was dozing, and this was how he spent his afternoons. Theodore called to him from the fence, and he stirred, walked over. The two of them stood there in the sun talking about the hot weather. When Judy arrived, she sang hello to Theodore from behind the back-door screen and said she would make some iced tea.

  Then she said, “I’ll get your straw hat, Dad. The sun’s so bright!”

  “The way she worries about me,” Theodore said to his neighbor. “Jesus.”

  The neighbor said, “I got severe abdominal cramps, lately.”

  “Pay no attention to it,” Theodore said.

  “It’s quite bad sometimes—it radiates into my shoulder. I’m afraid it’s my pancreas.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “The pancreas is something you have to have or you die.”

  “Well, then I guess we got ours.”

  “You mean to tell me you don’t know what the pancreas is?”

  “Sure, I know what it is,” Theodore said, “I just don’t think about it a lot. I bet I haven’t spent five minutes thinking about my pancreas in my whole life.”

  “I believe mine hurts,” said his neighbor.

  “Maybe it hurts because you’re thinking about it. Stand around and think about your lungs for a while, maybe it’ll go away and your lungs will start to hurt.”

  “You noticed something funny about my breathing.”

  “I thought we were talking about your pancreas.”

  Judy came out of the house, carrying a tray with iced tea on it, and wearing Theodore’s wide-brimmed straw hat at a crooked angle. “If you’re going to stand out in the sun you ought to have a hat on,” she said to him. She put the tray down on the umbrella table and came over and put the hat on his head. Then she opened the gate and invited the neighbor to come have a glass of iced tea. The neighbor, whose name was Benjamin Hawkins, was obviously a little confused at first, since in the five or six years that they had been meeting to talk over this fence neither of the two men had ever suggested that things turn into a full-fledged visit—not at this time of day, just before supper. It just wasn’t in their pattern, though sometimes in the evenings they watched baseball together, and once in a while they might stroll down to the corner, to the tavern there, for a beer. Talking over the fence was reserved for those times when one or the other or both of them didn’t feel much like doing anything else.

  And so the invitation was not a very good idea, and Theodore let Judy know it with a look—though she ignored it and went right on talking to Ben Hawkins about what a nice thing it was to have a cool drink in the shade on a hot summer day. It was as if she were hurrying through everything she said, her voice rising, as she took Ben’s arm and started him in the direction of the umbrella table. In only a moment, Theodore understood what was happening, for he had turned and he could see that someone, a woman, not young, was standing in the back door.

  “Well,” Ben was saying, “you make it sound so good, Mrs. Weathers.”

  “What the hell,” Theodore said to his daughter-in-law.

  She squeezed his elbow, and asked for kindness. “This is a nice lady I work with sometimes at the hospital. She’s a volunteer—and she’s a doll.”

  “I don’t remember asking you to introduce me to people.”

  “Dad—please. She’s already nervous about meeting you.”

  “I don’t remember saying a thing about being introduced to anyone.”

  “She was a mathematics teacher, Dad—like you. And she loves poetry and books. She’s a wonderful talker.”

  “So, put her on Johnny Carson.”

  “This is what I have to deal with,” she said to Ben.

  “This is what she has to deal with in my house,” Theodore said.

  “Dad, I swear I’ll never forgive you.”

  She took Ben by the elbow again, and walked with him across the yard, and Theodore followed, lagging behind. The old woman opened the back door and stepped out on the small porch there, already apologizing for having intruded, speaking so low that you had to strain to hear her, while Judy forged on with the introductions, as if this were the beginning of a party. She hustled and got them all seated at the umbrella table and then she poured the iced tea, and nobody had a thing to say until Ben asked the woman, whose name was Alice Karnes, if she ever had any trouble with caffeine in her system.

  “Pardon me?” Alice Karnes said.

  “Well, I guess I was wondering if any of us are allergic to caffeine. It does funny things to me—”

  “That’s your nerves,” Judy said.

  “I’ve read that caffeine raises your blood pressure,” said Ben. “I only allow myself two cups of coffee a day, and I’ve had my two cups—so this tea is cheating.”

  There was a pause in which everyone seemed to consider this, and finally Judy remarked that the tea was decaffeinated. “Oh, well,” Ben said, and laughed. Theodore stared off at the fenced yards in their even rows down the block, and left his glass untouched; Judy knew very well that he didn’t like sweet drinks. He would have preferred a touch of whiskey, and apparently the thought produced the words, because now Judy had fixed him with her eyes.

  “Did I speak out of turn?” he said.

  Judy seemed about to scold, but then her guest spoke: “Actually, I think I’d like a touch of whiskey myself.”

  Theodore looked at her. “What was your name again?”

  “I’m Alice Karnes.”

  “Where you from, Alice.”

  “Why, I’m from Ohio.”

  “And I bet they drink good whiskey in Ohio, don’t they.”

  “I never thought about it, but I guess they do.”

  “Would you like a touch of Virginia bourbon whiskey?”

  She looked a trifle uncertain, glancing at Judy. Then she nodded. “I believe I would, yes.”

  “I never met anybody that a little whiskey wouldn’t improve,” Theodore said.

  “It kills brain cells,” said Judy.

  “But
we have millions of those,” Ben Hawkins said.

  Theodore had already got to his feet, and was going into the house. He had some of today’s bottle left, and since Judy had moved in on his life he kept a stash in the basement, behind a brick in the wall at the base of the stairs, where for thirty-two years he had hid pint bottles of whiskey from his wife, Margaret. Margaret had been a very religious woman with a strong inclination to worry, whose father had stupidly drunk himself into ruin. Theodore had managed to convince her that one drink was all right—was even beneficial—and so he would have his one drink in the evenings, and then if he wanted more (he almost always wanted at least a little bit more) he would sneak it. Margaret had gone to her grave convinced of the moderate habits of her husband, who, often enough in the thirty-two years, came to bed late, and slept more deeply than he ever did when there was no inducement to sleep coursing through his blood. In the last few weeks he had gone back to keeping the stash, partly as a defense against the meddling of his daughter-in-law—the idea had come from that—but also, now, because it brought back a sense of his life in better times.

  Except that this time of all times, all the thousands of times he’d descended these stairs with the thought of a drink of whiskey … this time something gave way in his leg, near the knee.

  It might have been simply a false step. But something that had always been there before wasn’t there for a crucial, awful instant, and he was airborne, tumbling into the dark. He hit twice, and was conscious enough to hear the terrible clatter he made—his leg snapped as he struck bottom. It sounded like an old stick. Nothing quite hurt yet, though. What he felt more than anything was surprise. He lay there at the bottom of the stairs, still in his straw hat, waiting for someone to get to him, and then the pain began to seep into his leg; it made him nauseous. “Goddamn,” he said, or thought he said. Then Judy was on the stairs, thumping partway down. He believed he heard her cry of alarm, and he wanted to tell her to calm down and shut up, a woman more than fifty years old crying and screaming like a little girl. He wanted to tell her to please get someone, and to hurry, but he couldn’t speak, couldn’t draw in enough air. Somewhere far away Benjamin Hawkins was crying out for God, his voice shaking, seeming to shrink somehow, and Theodore strained to keep hearing it, feeling himself start downward, floating downward and into some other place, a place none of them could be now. It was quiet, and he knew he was gone, he was aware of it, and he turned in himself and looked at it—a man knocked out and staring at his own unconsciousness. Then it was all confused, he was talking to his sons, it was decades ago—they were gathered around him, like a congregation, and he was speaking to them, only what he was saying made no sense; it was just numbers and theorems and equations, as if this were one of the thousands of math classes he had taught. There had been so many times when he had constructed in his mind exactly what he would say to them if he could have got them together like this—all their slights and their carelessness and their use of him, and their use of their mother, all the things he wanted them to know they had done, and here he was with math coming out of his mouth.

  He woke up in a bright hospital room with a television set suspended in the air above his head, and a window to his left looking out on a soot-stained brick wall. Sitting in one of two chairs by his bed was a woman he did not at first remember having seen before.

  “Who are you,” he said.

  “Alice Karnes.”

  He looked along the length of his body. His leg was in an ugly brace, and there was a pin sticking through his knee. It went into the violet, bruised skin there like something stuck through rubber. There were pulleys and gears attached to an apparatus at the foot of the bed, looking like instruments of torture. He lay back and closed his eyes, and remembered his dream of talking, and thought of death. It came to him like a chilly little breath at the base of his neck, and he opened his eyes to look at Alice Karnes.

  “Does it hurt very bad?” she asked.

  “What’re you doing here,” he said.

  “Judy asked me to come. I’m sorry.”

  “How long have I been here.”

  “Just a day. I’m sorry—last night and today.”

  “What is Judy doing?”

  “She went to get something to eat. She wanted me to stay in case you woke up. You’ve been in and out, sort of.”

  “I don’t remember a thing.” He looked at her. She had very light blue eyes, a small, thin mouth. Her hair was arranged in a tight little bun on top of her head. She sat there with her hands folded tightly in her lap, smiling at him as if someone had just said something embarrassing or off-color. “What’re we supposed to do now,” he said.

  “Well, I don’t think we’ll do any calisthenics,” she said. Then she blushed. “I guess that’s a bad joke, isn’t it.”

  “It’s hilarious. I’m chuckling on the inside.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re trying to be kind, is that it?”

  “Judy didn’t want you to wake up alone—”

  “Maybe I want to be alone.”

  “That’s your privilege.” She sat there.

  “And what do you want?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t be able to say.”

  “Why not?”

  She shrugged. “Judy wanted me to sit with her. I felt bad about what happened to you.”

  “I’ve never been in a hospital as a patient in my life,” he said. “Not in eighty-three years.”

  “I guess there’s a time for everything.”

  “I guess there is.”

  “Do you want me to leave?” she asked him.

  He had closed his eyes again. It had come to him that he might never leave the hospital. He breathed slowly, feeling himself begin to shake deep in his bones.

  “Of course, I don’t mind staying,” she said.

  “Why?” His voice had been steady; he’d heard how steady it was.

  “I’m the volunteer type,” she said.

  “I don’t want any damned charity,” he said, trying to glare at her.

  “Oh, it’s not charity.”

  “Charity begins at home. Go home and give it to your own people.”

  She said something about distances, and times; other lives. He didn’t quite catch it. A sudden pain had throbbed through his knee, on up the thigh; it made him realize how badly he’d been hurt, how deep the aches were in his hips and lower back and shoulders. When he touched his own cheek, he felt a lump as big as an ice cube, and it was a moment before he realized that it was a bandage over a bruise or laceration.

  “Well, I don’t want anything,” he heard himself say.

  “I’m calling the nurse for you,” she said, “Then if you want I’ll go.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “This is awful,” he said.

  “I’m so sorry,” she told him.

  “Don’t talk to me about sorry. I don’t want to hear sorry.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I didn’t mean that—is there anything I can do to make you more comfortable?”

  The pain had let up some, but he was still shaking inside. He took a deep breath. “You could put me out of my misery,” he said.

  “I’ve pushed the button for the nurse. She ought to be here.”

  A moment later, wanting talk, he said “How old are you?”

  “Oh, you shouldn’t ask a lady her age.”

  “I’m eighty-three,” he said, “goddammit. How old are you?”

  “Seventy-eight.”

  “A baby,” he said.

  “That’s very kind of you.”

  A moment later, he said, “I remember when I was your age.” She smiled.

  “Got any children?” he asked. Then he said, “Come on, talk.”

  “I had two children—they live in Tennessee—”

  “They ever come to see you?”

  “I go to see them. Christmases and holidays. And for a whi
le in summer.”

  The pain had mostly subsided now. He sighed, breathed, tried to remain perfectly still for a moment. Then he turned his head and looked straight at her. “Are you lonely?”

  “That’s not a proper question to ask someone like me.”

  “You’re lonely as hell,” he said.

  “And you?” she asked, her eyes flashing.

  “I don’t think about it if I’m allowed not to.” She looked down at her hands.

  “I got a daughter-in-law that insists on reminding me of it—and now she’s trying to match us up. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say such things. She told me I’d like you, as a matter of fact—she said you were interesting and that I’d like you. I found the whole thing very embarrassing.”

  “You found me a little blunt for you—a little rough, maybe.”

  “Is that the way you see yourself?”

  “Suppose it is?”

  “It seems to me that if you knew you were being too blunt or rough you’d do something about it.”

  “Right,” he said, “I should remember to be charming. Can I get you anything?”

  “Do you want me to leave? Just say so.”

  He didn’t want her to leave; he didn’t want to be alone. He said, “Tell me about your children.”

  “There’s not much to tell—they have children. I think I need a frame of reference, you know—a—a context.” She pulled the edge of her dress down over her knees. “What about you? Tell me about your children.”

  “My children are mostly gone now. The ones who survive hate me.”

  “I’m sure that’s not so.”

  “Don’t say crap like that when I tell you something,” he said, “I’m telling you something. I know what I’m talking about. There’s no love lost, you know? Maybe I just don’t have anything else to do right now but tell the truth. And to tell you the truth, I never much liked my children. I never had much talent for people in general, if you want to know the truth about it.”