The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “You believe this?” Meg says. “You think I should go with him?”

  “He wants to take you somewhere?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What about the Harmons?”

  Meg looks at her. “What about them?”

  “They’re on their way here, too.”

  “I can’t handle the Harmons anymore,” Meg tells her.

  “Who asked you to handle them?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Well—are you just going to go off with Larry?”

  “I don’t know what he wants.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, Meg. He wouldn’t come all this way just to tell you hello.”

  “That’s what he said. He said ‘Hello.’”

  “Meg.”

  “I’m telling you, honey, I just don’t have a clue.”

  In a little while Larry arrives, looking sheepish and expectant. Milly lets him in, and accepts his clumsy embrace, explaining that Meg is in the bathroom changing out of her bathing suit.

  “Hey,” he says, “I brought mine with me.”

  “She’ll be through in a minute.”

  “Is she mad at me?” he asks.

  “She’s just changing,” Milly tells him.

  He looks around the room, walks over to the Port-a-Crib and stands there making little cooing sounds at the baby. “He’s smiling at me. Look at that.”

  “He smiles a lot.” She moves to the other side of the crib and watches him make funny faces at the baby.

  Larry is a fair, willowy man, and though he’s older than Milly, she has always felt a tenderness toward him for his obvious unease with her, for the way Meg orders him around, and for his boyish romantic fragility—which, she realizes now, reminds her a little of Wally. It’s in the moment that she wishes he hadn’t come here that she thinks of this, and abruptly she has an urge to reach across the crib and touch his wrist, as if to make up for some wrong she’s done. He leans down and puts one finger into the baby’s hand. “Look at that,” he says. “Quite a grip. Boy’s going to be a linebacker.”

  “He’s small for his age,” Milly tells him.

  “It’s not the size. It’s the strength.”

  She says nothing. She wishes Meg would come out of the bathroom. Larry pats the baby’s forehead, then moves to the windows and, holding the drapes back, looks out.

  “Pretty,” he says. “Looks like it’ll be a nice, clear night for fireworks.”

  For the past year or so, Larry has worked in a shoe store in Urbana, and he’s gone through several other jobs, though he often talks about signing up for English courses at the junior college and getting started on a career. He wants to save money for school, but in five years he hasn’t managed to save enough for one course. He explains himself in terms of his appetite for life: he’s unable to put off the present, and frugality sometimes suffers. Meg has often talked about him with a kind of wonder at his capacity for pleasure. It’s not a thing she would necessarily want to change. He can make her laugh, and he writes poems to her, to women in general, though according to Meg they’re not very good poems.

  The truth is, he’s an amiable, dreamy young man without an ounce of objectivity about himself, and what he wears on this occasion seems to illustrate this. His bohemian dress is embarrassingly like a costume—the bright red scarf and black beret and jeans; the sleeveless turtleneck shirt, its dark colors bleeding into each other across the front.

  “So,” he says, turning from the windows. “Are the grandparents around?”

  She draws in a breath, deciding to tell him about the Harmons, but Meg comes out of the bathroom at last. She’s wearing the kimono open, showing the white shorts and blouse she’s changed into.

  Larry stands straight, clears his throat. “God, Meg. You look great,” he says.

  Meg flops down on the bed nearest the door and lights a cigarette. “Larry, what’re you trying to pull here?”

  “Nothing,” he says. He hasn’t moved. He’s standing by the windows. “I just wanted to see you again. I thought Philadelphia on the Fourth might be good.”

  “Okay,” Meg says, drawing on the cigarette.

  “You know me,” he says. “I have a hard time saying this sort of stuff up close.”

  “What sort of stuff, Larry.”

  “I’ll take Zeke for a walk,” Milly says.

  “I can’t believe this,” Meg says, blowing smoke.

  Milly gathers up the baby, but Larry stops her. “You don’t have to go.” “Stay,” Meg tells her.

  “I thought I’d go out and meet the Harmons.”

  “Come on, tell me what you’re doing here,” Meg says to Larry.

  “You don’t know?”

  “What if I need you to tell me anyway,” she says.

  He hesitates, then reaches into his jeans and brings out a piece of folded paper. “Here.”

  Meg takes it, but doesn’t open it. “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  “I can’t read it with you watching me like that. Jesus, Larry—what in the world’s going through your mind?”

  “I started thinking about it being final,” he says, looking down. Milly moves to the other side of the room, to her own bed, still holding the baby.

  “I won’t read it with you standing here,” Meg says.

  Larry reaches for the door. “I’ll be outside,” he says.

  Milly, turning to sit with her back to them, hears the door close quietly. She looks at Meg, who’s sitting against the headboard of the other bed, the folded paper in her lap.

  “Aren’t you going to read it?”

  “I’m embarrassed for him.”

  Milly recalls her own, secret, embarrassment at the unattractive, hyenalike note poor Wally struck every time he laughed. “It was probably done with love,” she says.

  Meg offers her the piece of paper across the space between the two beds. “You read it to me.”

  “I can’t do that, Meg. It’s private. I shouldn’t even be here.”

  Meg opens the folded paper, and reads silently. “Jesus,” she says. “Listen to this.”

  “Meg,” Milly says.

  “You’re my sister. Listen. ‘When I began to think our time was really finally up/My chagrined regretful eyes lumbered tightly shut.’ Lumbered, for God’s sake.”

  Milly says nothing.

  “My eyes lumbered shut.”

  And quite suddenly the two of them are laughing. They laugh quietly, or they try to. Milly sets Zeke down on his back, and pulls the pillows of the bed to her face in an attempt to muffle herself, and when she looks up she sees Meg on all fours with her blanket pulled over her head and, beyond her, Larry’s faint shadow through the window drapes. He’s pacing. He stops and leans on the railing, looking out at the pool.

  “Shhh,” Meg says, finally. “There’s more.” She sits straight, composes herself, pushes the hair back from her face, and holds up the now crumpled piece of paper. “Oh,” she says. “Ready?”

  “Meg, he’s right there.”

  Meg looks. “He can’t hear anything.”

  “Whisper,” Milly says.

  Meg reads. “‘I cried and sighed under the lids of these lonely eyes/Because I knew I’d miss your lavish thighs.’”

  For a few moments they can say nothing. Milly, coughing and sputtering into the cotton smell of the sheets, has a moment of perceiving, by contrast, the unhappiness she’s lived with these last few months, how bad it has been—this terrible time—and it occurs to her that she’s managed it long enough not to notice it, quite. Everything is suffused in an ache she’s grown accustomed to, and now it’s as if she’s flying in the face of it all. She laughs more deeply than she ever has, laughs even as she thinks of the Harmons, and of her grief. She’s woozy from lack of air and breath. At last she sits up, wipes her eyes with part of the pillowcase, still laughing. The baby’s fussing, so she works to stop, to gain some control of herself. She realizes that Meg is in the bathroom, running water. The
n Meg comes out and offers her a wet washcloth.

  “I didn’t see you go in there.”

  “Quiet,” Meg says. “Don’t get me started again.”

  Milly holds the baby on one arm. “I have to feed Zeke some more.”

  “So once more I don’t get to hold him.”

  They look at each other.

  “Poor Larry,” Meg says. “Married to a philistine. But—just maybe—he did the right thing, coming here.”

  “You don’t suppose he heard us.”

  “I don’t suppose it matters if he did. He’d never believe we could laugh at one of his poems.”

  “Oh, Meg—that’s so mean.”

  “It’s the truth. There are some things, honey, that love just won’t change.”

  Now it’s as if they are both suddenly aware of another context for these words—both thinking about Wally. They gaze at each other. But then the moment passes. They turn to the window and Meg says, “Is Larry out there? What’ll I tell him anyway?” She crosses the room and looks through the little peephole in the door. “God,” she says, “the Harmons are here.”

  Mrs. Harmon is standing in front of the door with Larry, who has apparently begun explaining himself. Larry turns and takes Meg by the arm as she and Milly come out. “All the way from Champaign to head it off,” he says to Mrs. Harmon. “I hope I just avoided making the biggest mistake of my life.”

  “God,” Meg says to him. “If only you had money.” She laughs at her own joke. Mrs. Harmon steps around her to take the baby’s hand. She looks up at Milly. “I’m afraid we went overboard,” she says. “We went shopping for the baby.”

  Milly nods at her. There’s confusion now: Larry and Meg are talking, seem about to argue. Larry wants to know what Meg thinks of the poem, but Milly doesn’t hear what she says to him. Mrs. Harmon is apologizing for coming earlier than planned.

  “It’s only an hour or so,” Milly says, and then wonders if that didn’t sound somehow ungracious. She can’t think of anything else to say. And then she turns to see Mr. Harmon laboring up the stairs. He’s carrying a giant teddy bear with a red ribbon wrapped around its thick middle. He has it over his shoulder, like a man lugging a body. The teddy bear is bigger than he is, and the muscles of his neck are straining as he sets it down. “This is for Wally,” he says with a smile that seems sad. His eyes are moist. He puts one arm around his wife’s puffy midriff and says, “I mean—if it’s okay.”

  “I don’t want to be divorced,” Larry is saying to Meg.

  Milly looks at the Harmons, at the hopeful, nervous expressions on their faces, and then she tries to give them the satisfaction of her best appreciation: she marvels at the size and the softness of the big teddy, and she holds the baby up to it, saying, “See? See?”

  “It’s quite impractical, of course,” says Mr. Harmon.

  “We couldn’t pass it up,” his wife says. “We have some other things in the car.”

  “I don’t know where we’ll put it,” says Milly.

  “We can keep it here,” Mrs. Harmon hurries to say. She’s holding on to her husband, and her pinched, unhappy features make her look almost frightened. Mr. Harmon raises the hand that had been around her waist and lightly, reassuringly, clasps her shoulder. He stands there, tall and straight in that intentionally ramrod-stiff way of his—the stance, he would say, of an old military man, which happens to be exactly what he is. His wife stands closer to him, murmurs something about the fireworks going off in the distance. It seems to Milly that they’re both quite changed; it’s as if they’ve come with bad news and are worried about hurting her with more of it. Then she realizes what it is they are trying to give her, in what is apparently the only way they know how, and she remembers that they have been attempting to get used to the loss of their only child. She feels her throat constrict, and when Larry reaches for her sister, putting his long, boy’s arms around Meg, it’s as if this embrace is somehow the expression of what they all feel. The Harmons are gazing at the baby now. Still arm in arm.

  “Yes,” Milly tells them, her voice trembling. “Yes, of course. You—we could keep it here.”

  Meg and Larry are leaning against the railing, in their embrace. It strikes Milly that she’s the only one of these people without a lover, without someone to stand with. She lifts the baby to her shoulder and looks away from them all, but only for a moment. Far off, the sky is turning dusky; it’s getting near the time for rockets and exploding blooms of color.

  “Dinner for everyone,” Mr. Harmon says, his voice full of brave cheerfulness. He leans close to Milly, and speaks to the child. “And you, young fellow, you’ll have to wait awhile.”

  “We’ll eat at the motel restaurant and then watch the fireworks,” says Mrs. Harmon. “We could sit right here on the balcony and see it all.”

  Meg touches the arm of the teddy bear. “Thing’s as big as a real bear,” she says.

  “I feel like fireworks,” Larry says.

  “They put on quite a show,” says Mr. Harmon. “There used to be a big field out this way—before they widened the street. Big field of grass, and people would gather—”

  “We brought Wally here when he was a little boy,” Mrs. Harmon says. “So many—such good times.”

  “They still put on a good show,” Mr. Harmon says, squeezing his wife’s shoulder.

  Milly faces him, faces them, fighting back any sadness. In the next moment, without quite thinking about it, she steps forward slightly and offers her child to Mrs. Harmon. Mrs. Harmon tries to speak, but can’t. Her husband clears his throat, lifts the big teddy bear as if to show it to everyone again. But he, too, is unable to speak. He sets it down, and seems momentarily confused. Milly lightly grasps his arm above the elbow, and steps forward to watch her mother-in-law cradle the baby. Mrs. Harmon makes a slight swinging motion, looking at her husband, and then at Milly. “Such a pretty baby,” she says.

  Mr. Harmon says, “A handsome baby.”

  Meg and Larry move closer. They all stand there on the motel balcony with the enormous teddy bear propped against the railing. They are quiet, almost shy, not quite looking at each other, and for the moment it’s as if, like the crowds beginning to gather on the roofs of the low buildings across the street, they have come here only to wait for what will soon be happening in every quarter of the city of brotherly love.

  THE BRACE

  Tonight, a little more than a month after my one brother turns up out of the blue—ten years older and looking it, with a badly mangled arm from a bomb blast at a church in Beirut—our difficult and famous father arrives from Italy, on yet another of his unannounced stopovers. He calls from the airport to say he’s hired a cab and is coming. This time, he says, he’s headed back to Santa Monica, having spent the last four months in Rome. When I’m through talking to him, I give the handset to my husband, who puts it back in its cradle and then gives me a look. We smile. Daddy doesn’t know James has been staying with us. James is in town somewhere and doesn’t know the old man’s breezed in. “This is going to be something,” I say.

  A little later we watch the old man climb out of the cab and work to get his luggage from the trunk. When my husband moves to go out and help him, I take his arm above the elbow. “Tom,” I say. “Wait. Let the cabbie do it.”

  We stand there, the welcoming committee, and I’m thinking how I’ll choose the moment to tell my father that his son is visiting, too.

  Tom holds the door open, and I step out.

  “Don’t say anything,” I say. “Let me do the talking.”

  “You’re enjoying this too much,” Tom says. “I don’t think you should get such pleasure out of it.”

  “It’s a reunion,” I say.

  “Oh,” he says. “Wicked,” smiling at me.

  Daddy fumbles around in the pockets of his suit while we watch from the porch. “All right,” I say. “But watch him make us pay for the cab. Again.”

  “Listen to you. You can’t keep the admiration out of your
voice,” Tom says. A moment later he says, “I hope we can think of this as a positive thing. Maybe we ought to let them both just stumble onto each other.”

  “I’d like to film it,” I say, and Tom shakes his head.

  My father’s coming up the walk now, and the cabdriver’s leaning against the idling taxi, obviously waiting for his fare. It’s getting toward dusk, and there are shadows out in the street. Above the trees I can see the faint outline of the moon, and I think of convergences, chance meetings, and how my father will think I somehow arranged the whole thing. He’ll probably blame me for not telling him over the telephone so he could choose to travel on.

  “Hey,” he says, stepping up onto the porch. His step is slow, and he seems to sag. He looks sleepless and worn out, and there’s a faintly jaundiced cast to his skin, a darkness around the eyes. Apparently travel doesn’t agree with him the way it used to. It’s as if he’s not coming from Europe and all sorts of honors and interviews—and a long, successful run of one of his plays—but from a job he hates and has to go back to.

  And I’m about to tell him James has come home. They haven’t spoken in almost twenty years, since long before James dropped out of sight altogether.

  I stand aside and pull the screen open for him and smile, thinking I’ll tell him before he says anything. But then I find I can’t do it yet. The time is just not right; to say anything now would be somehow aggressive. I myself haven’t seen him in more than a year. “Marilyn,” he says. And then he nods at Tom. “Tom.” For a moment it’s like all the other times, and I hear the something condescending in his voice as he says Tom’s name, as if the man I chose to marry was a little boy with dirt on his face. Tom takes his bags and starts upstairs with them.

  “I need some change to pay the driver,” my father says.

  “I don’t know why you insist on the taxi,” Tom says. “I’d pick you up.”

  “Wouldn’t want to trouble you, Tom.” My father smiles, all affability and consideration. He told me once that he respects Tom for the fact that Tom isn’t capable of understanding what he does and is therefore not in awe of it. He meant it as a compliment, I’m afraid; it was one of his careless observations. He has never been a man with much access to his effect on other people, for all the famous sensibility of the plays.