The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “We’ll come visit you,” I told my mother.

  So we’d go over for weekends. We’d play with Willy, and watch him and laugh. We’d look at old movies on TV or have a few rounds of gin rummy while he slept. I would read something to Willy before he went to bed every night. It got so he knew the stories by heart, and then as he got older and was in school, he would read them to me. He would tell me how things went at school. I’d come in from being with him and the two women would be dealing cards, laughing and teasing each other. We might as well have lived over there.

  But then, a couple years ago, things started to go sour for Ruth’s brother up in Boston, and he had to let go of the house in Virginia. This was right before the real estate business fell through the floor around here. Anyway, Mom had to move in with us. It was supposed to be temporary. And it’s a different thing when you have to live together.

  Nobody, but nobody, thought things would dry up so suddenly. Up until two years ago, the main industry in this poor county was building houses. Now it was coming down all around, and we didn’t see it coming. There had been slumps and setbacks before, but business always bounced back. This time, it got so Teddy Aubrey couldn’t pay me for work I’d already done, though he kept promising he’d catch up, and I believed him because I couldn’t afford not to. For a while I was doing jobs on pure spec—working for nothing in the hope of some new development. But every shift in the winds brought more bad news, and as you know, the bill collectors and the banks never have been too notable for understanding when you can’t pay what you owe.

  The reason I bring this up is so you’ll understand what we came from, and where we had been, and maybe you’ll know how much it hurt me every time I saw that woman come walking up the sidewalk with her hair tied back like that, wearing sweat clothes and no makeup, and with other people’s dirt on her hands. She’d raised me; she’d never trained herself for anything else. She’d been led to believe by everybody and everything that she would never have to work outside the house if she didn’t want to. She’d taken to smoking again. Her cough was back. I hated that, and so every day I was out looking for any kind of work. Even handyman stuff, which I did get now and then—forty dollars here, fifty dollars there. Enough for a couple days’ worth of groceries, or for part of a payment.

  Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people worse off than we are. I’m not asking for sympathy, really. What I’m trying to do is explain.

  The night she came home with the news about Mrs. Wilton and the remodeling job, we celebrated. We had beer in Ruth’s old champagne glasses, toasting Mrs. Wilton and her big old house. Janet already had herself worked into thinking it’d last into the summer. Five thousand dollars net, at least. She hugged Willy and teased him about the baseball glove, and after dinner she asked Ruth, “How about a game of gin rummy?”

  We hadn’t played cards since the first days after Ruth moved in with us. Ruth looked at my wife and nodded with the best smile—a smile like the good days we’d had. It made me happy, and when I said I’d watch TV, for a second there I couldn’t quite find my voice.

  I went in and watched the ball game, with the sound up fairly loud, in case Willy didn’t know it was on. He stayed in the kitchen with the women.

  “Hey,” I said. “Willy?” I was feeling good. I thought all I had to do was show him how glad I was.

  He came to the doorway.

  “Ball game’s on,” I said to him, like one man talking to another.

  “I heard it,” he said. One thing I hate is when a man doesn’t look you in the eye. When I was nine, I was playing third base in the Little League and looking straight back at people.

  “Come here,” I said.

  “I don’t want to watch the game, Dad.”

  I got up and turned the TV off, and when I got to the kitchen he was standing by his grandmother’s chair.

  “Get your mitt,” I said.

  “I don’t want to,” he said. Still not looking at me.

  “Stand up straight, son.”

  And Janet said, “Leave him alone about it, will you?”

  “I wanted to throw the ball around,” I said.

  “Okay,” Willy said. Whining.

  “No,” I told them. “The hell with it.”

  “Go throw the ball around with your son,” Ruth said.

  So we went out into the yard. My heart wasn’t in it. I felt wrong, and my boy looked like somebody being punished. He was scared of the ball, I could tell. No matter how easy I lobbed it. After a few minutes of this I said, “Okay, I’m beat.”

  “Sure?” he said.

  “Really.”

  He was a little too quick going up on the porch, and I guess he sensed it, because he stopped at the door. For that second he stood in the same stance as he did when I was mad at him before. Even the same look on his face. “If you want to, we can play catch some more,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” I told him, and I patted his skinny shoulder. My boy. “You go on in,” I said.

  I sat on the porch and listened to them inside, Ruth and Janet playing their cards, Willy making little war sounds with his mouth, his toy men. It was a pretty twilight. The sun came through the leaves and diere was a breeze stirring. I could hear the traffic way out on Route 29, and birds were singing, too. I felt sad, and it was as if I could turn around in myself and look at the feeling. I thought about how things go on, and other changes come. Hard times arrive sooner or later for everybody. Ruth’s parents went through the Depression.

  I was thinking about this when Ruth came out.

  “What about cards?” I said.

  “Janet’s using the powder room. Thought I’d come out and smoke a cigarette.”

  Janet doesn’t let her smoke in the house. She lighted up. Nobody enjoys a cigarette like my mother. “So,” she said. “We’ll go over to Mrs. Wilton’s at nine o’clock tomorrow. That’s when I told her.”

  “We?” I said.

  “I told her I’d bring you over and introduce you.”

  “How bad did you brag on me, Ruth?”

  “I’m not bragging.” She blew smoke, then she looked down at her tennis shoes. “I need new shoes.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “These are comfortable, though.”

  “They’re falling apart.”

  “They’re like an old pair of slippers,” she said, crossing one over the other. She leaned on the railing and smoked. Then she sighed, and when she started talking again there was something else in her voice: she was someone remembering a thing with pain. Except it wasn’t quite that, either, because I heard no regret in it, and she didn’t seem sad. “You know, I used to say that was how your father and I were, a nice old comfy worn pair of slippers. It used to make me feel good saying it. Imagine.”

  “I think I remember you saying it,” I told her.

  “It was a joke we had,” she said. “Nothing original or anything.”

  I was quiet.

  Then she said, “He never was much of a father to you.”

  “No,” I said.

  And she said, “I think you’re doing the right thing with Willy.”

  “Well,” I said, “I wish I knew for sure sometimes.”

  Inside, Janet was shuffling the cards. “Mom?” she said.

  “Be right there,” Ruth said. She flicked the cigarette out on the lawn and leaned down to kiss me on the cheek. For a second I had this funny sense of what she must’ve been like when she was young, a girl, before her husband took everything she had to give him and then left her. “I feel good this evening,” she said to me. “I think it’s going to work out fine.”

  Mrs. Wilton lives in those hills south of here. A big gray house with about four different entrances. I couldn’t go with Ruth at nine o’clock because Willy messed around in his room and wound up missing the school bus and I had to drive him, so Ruth called Mrs. Wilton and set up a visit for later in the morning. I got Willy in the car and we headed out, neither one of
us much in the mood for talk. He stared out his side. I had yelled at him for putting everything on his mother, and then Janet got miffed at me for coming down on him too hard. It was a sunny morning, and I felt like hell.

  “I don’t mean to be too hard on you,” I said to Willy.

  Nothing. It made me mad.

  “You hear what I said?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I took hold of his shoulder so he looked at me, and then I pointed out the windows of the car. “That’s the world out there, son. They don’t care whether you make it or not. You understand? They’d just as soon walk over you as look at you. And it’s my job to make you ready for it. Get you so you can walk out in it and not get knocked down.” I was almost yelling now. But I was right. I didn’t mean for him to do any daydreaming while I told him, and what I was telling him was the truth. “I need you to be tough,” I said. I said, “I don’t want you coming back to me when you’ve been out there and saying you didn’t know, that I didn’t tell you.”

  “Okay,” he said. And he started to cry.

  “I’m not yelling at you,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Yes, sir.” He was giving me this look, like a scared rabbit.

  “Dammit,” I said. “Sit up straight.” It was like everything I’d been through came rushing up behind my eyes, and I wanted to hit him. “Sit up,” I said. “And stop blubbering. You baby.”

  He sat straight, looking at me out of the corner of his eye, ready to duck, as if all he ever had from me was getting hit. I have never hit him, or anyone else for that matter. I can’t explain it any better than this. In my mind, I saw myself reach over and smack him. I was that close. I didn’t even like him in that minute. “Quit being such a baby about it,” I said. “Stop crying right now. NOW!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  And he was trying to stop. He had wet all over his face—tears, and stuff from his nose. He kept sniffling, and his hands went up to his mouth. I thought he might’ve gagged.

  “Okay, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to yell at you.”

  Then I was just driving, and he was leaning over against the window, still sniffling. We went on that way for a while, and when I looked at his back, I felt something drop down inside me, like a big collapsing wall.

  “They don’t care about you out there,” I told him when I could get my voice again. But it sounded empty now, and I knew something else had happened. I wished I had another mind, some other set of memories.

  When we pulled into the school parking lot, I put my hand on his arm. “You all right now?” I said. I couldn’t find any other voice to use with him; it was like I was a drill sergeant. He nodded, and I could see that all he wanted was to get away from me. I told him again, “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. It just got me going.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said. That little scared kid’s crying voice.

  “All right,” I said, and let him go. He got out, dropped a book, and bent over to get it—a boy out in front of a big brick and aluminum building, going through a bad morning in his life. I watched him walk on into the school, and then I drove back to the house, so sick at heart and full of rage that I drove past it.

  Ruth was waiting on the porch. “Daydreaming?” she said.

  I went on up and into the kitchen, where Janet sat drinking coffee. “What,” she said when I looked at her.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “We should go,” Ruth said from the door.

  “In a minute,” I said.

  “What happened?” Janet asked.

  I have never been able to get anything past her. After we’d been married a year, I got into a little hugging-kissing thing with this woman at the end of a party I’d gone to alone, and when I got home Janet knew the whole thing. I don’t mean that she saw lipstick on me or smelled the perfume or anything; she knew from me, from the way I was with her, that something was different. Now she sat there with her coffee and waited for me to tell her.

  “Maybe I’m not cut out to be a father,” I said.

  “Poor baby,” she said.

  I knew she was right about that, too. I’m not always a son of a bitch. I said, “All right.”

  “Did you yell at him?” she said.

  I couldn’t answer this.

  “You did, didn’t you. You got on him some more.”

  “I told him I was sorry,” I said.

  She stood and poured the rest of her coffee down the sink. “I won’t have you yelling at him.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Good gracious,” Ruth said from the door. “He’s just like you were, baby. You could dream the year away if somebody didn’t get after you and get you going.”

  “Ruth, please,” Janet said.

  “Fine. Fine. I’ll be out at the end of the sidewalk.”

  We both watched her go on into the sunlight. “Patience,” Janet said. It was as if she had said it to herself.

  I said, “I don’t have any left.”

  “Ha,” she said. “Maybe we can laugh it all off.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  She got her purse and put it over her shoulder, then stood at the door, watching Ruth, who was moving Willy’s bike off the sidewalk. “I hope she’s got you something, I’ll tell you that. Because lately I’ve been thinking of taking my son out of here.”

  “He’s my son, too.”

  She turned, faced me, and when she spoke it was in a quick voice I didn’t know. “We sound like a soap opera, don’t we?”

  “I love him,” I said. “I love you, too.”

  Ruth called from the sidewalk. “We really ought to get over there.”

  “I’ll do better,” I said. I didn’t want to think about what she’d do when she’d had enough of all this. “Please,” I said.

  She kissed my cheek, and then I saw that she was going to cry. “I took chicken out for dinner,” she said.

  “I’ll make it,” I told her.

  “Ruth wants to make her southern fried.”

  We went out and joined my mother, who had opened the car door and was waiting with her hands on her hips.

  “Conference over?” Ruth said.

  We got in, and we took Janet to work. Nobody said much. Janet kissed me and nodded goodbye to Ruth, and we watched her walk up the steps and into the building. She likes the job, that’s one lucky thing. You could see her step getting lighter the closer she got to the door.

  “Okay,” Ruth said as we pulled away. “So tell me.”

  “Nothing to tell,” I said.

  “She hates having me around, I know.”

  “It’s the whole situation,” I said. “It’s not just you.”

  She said, “I don’t blame her.”

  I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I didn’t want her to worry about it. “It’s me,” I said. “Janet’s unhappy with me.”

  “Well, it’s going to be better now,” she said. “We’ll have you working again. There’ll be more money.”

  We went on south, and all the way she talked about what a nice woman Mrs. Wilton was. Not like so many people who have money. Mrs. Wilton looked right at you when she talked and never put on any airs. She had a great laugh, and she liked to tell stories on herself. She’d love me if I got to telling my stories, and all I had to do was relax and be myself. Forget everything and just be who I really was. Her husband was some sort of expert in the fitness business, and owned a few spas in the area. The house was a beautiful old Victorian. Ruth couldn’t wait for me to see it.

  I went the long way, so we could go past the school. “I thought I’d drive by,” I said. “Wave to Willy, maybe.”

  There were a lot of kids out on the playground, four or five groups of them. I slowed down to look for Willy, but couldn’t see him in the middle of all that running and playing, all the colors.

  “I don’t see him,” Ruth said.

  I said, “No.”


  And everything must have been in my voice, because she said, “It’s going to be okay, son.”

  “I want him to know I give a damn what happens to him in life,” I said. “I didn’t have that when I was his age.”

  “Not from your father.”

  “That’s what I meant,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything else. She quietly directed me to the Wilton house. It was what she said it was, too, a big old gray clapboard place more than a hundred years old and, for all its nice tall rooms and big porches and balconies, needing a lot of work. Mrs. Wilton stood in her doorway as we came up the walk. I was surprised how young she was—mid-thirties, maybe. Maybe even younger than that. Pretty, with brown hair and dark eyes and a tanned look to her skin. She held the door open for us, and Ruth said my name to her. We shook hands. I noticed her hands were rough-feeling, almost like a man’s. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.

  “So,” she said. “Your mother says you’re a good man with a hammer and nails.”

  “I do my best,” I said.

  “He’s a real craftsman,” Ruth said.

  We were standing in the foyer of the house, and Mrs. Wilton turned and started through to what looked like a library.

  “Why don’t I just run the sweeper upstairs while you-all talk?” Ruth said.

  “But you were here yesterday.”

  “But you had the rugs out on the porch,” Ruth said. “Won’t take a minute.”

  My shoes sounded on the hardwood floor as I followed Mrs. Wilton, and Ruth said, “Baby, you watch those big heavy shoes on my fresh-waxed floor.”

  My fresh-waxed floor.

  I never felt lower, never felt worse all my life. We went into the library and Mrs. Wilton started talking about her bookshelves and what she wanted done—the painting and the crown molding and the wiring, the track lighting, measurements and kinds of wood and designs, and I didn’t hear most of it. I couldn’t look her in the face, couldn’t really say anything when she asked questions. I heard Ruth running the vacuum in the upstairs hall.

  “Look, is something wrong?” Mrs. Wilton said.

  “Yes,” I said. I was utterly unable to help myself. “All sorts of things are wrong.” I wanted to go on and say how my mother once had a cleaning lady of her own, and it wasn’t always like this with us. But I couldn’t even speak then, for what was going through me, the whole thing, the whole disaster of the last couple of years.