The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Mr. Gray likes the sun,” she said with a curt smile.

  “I’m so very sorry,” said Trueblood. “It’s awfully hot there, though, isn’t it?”

  “Nevertheless,” said the nurse.

  The disturbances in the other rooms stopped as if someone had shut them off, and she turned and went on. He followed. His mother’s room was at the end of the next corridor to the left. She was sitting up in bed. He thanked the nurse, who gave him a brittle smile and walked off.

  “Well, I’ve just had a wonderful experience,” he said to his mother. “I’d say it makes an exact picture of my relations with the rest of the world.”

  She said nothing, and he wasn’t certain that she’d heard him. She was drinking orange juice through a straw, from a large plastic cup. The room had one window looking out on a shade-spotted lawn, with gravel paths running through it. To the left, the other wing of the building was visible, a wall of windows, in one of which poor Mr. Gray sat, head down in the brightness. The trees on the lawn were old tall oaks and maples. Mildred Trueblood wore a nightgown with lacy cuffs; she did not look like a patient. When she had finished with the juice, she kept drawing on the straw, so it made a bubbling sound.

  “Mom,” Trueblood said, presenting the check. “Will you endorse this for me?”

  She looked at it. “I won’t touch it. Get me a drink.”

  “We’re going to need the money,” he said.

  She put the glass down, scooted under the blanket, and pulled it up over her head. “You spoke to him, didn’t you?” she said from under there.

  “He called, yes. I told you all this. I hung up on him.”

  “Good. Good boy. Stay a virgin.”

  “Mom, please cut it out.”

  “You’re not married. You’re a good boy.”

  He waited. She did not move. It was difficult to imagine her being young—the bright-smiling girl in the photographs, wearing a bathing suit and leaning on her young husband’s arm. A girl with all sorts of hurts and heartaches ahead of her, more than her share. He felt sorry for her, and an element of his aloneness welled up in him. He would be so much better to a wife. For a few seconds he had to choke back tears. It was all so humiliating. Life had shrunk to this, sitting in a chair in the psych ward, waiting for his mother to come to some kind of sense. He wanted to get her dressed and take her home. As softly as he could, he said, “We are going to need this money, Mom. We have to get you back on your feet.”

  Slowly she opened the blanket and sat up. “Give me the check.”

  He handed it to her. She reached for her glasses and put them on, then stared at it for a long time. Finally, she reached for the pen he held out to her, put the check down on the small bedside table, and wrote across the back of it, then folded it and handed it to him.

  “Thank you.” He put it away quickly, feeling shame for having it in sight. He had an irrational sense that he was cheating her.

  “Don’t patronize me, Anthony. Don’t be a man.” She lay back down and pulled the blanket up over her face. Her fingers shown on the outside of it, at about the level of her ears. This was the same woman who had come out to take part in the neighborhood baseball games when he was a boy.

  “Mom, the doctors say you’re fine. You’ll be coming home soon,” he said. “I have a woman there fixing it up for you.”

  She hadn’t moved. “Anthony, I won’t have some cheap woman going through my personal belongings.”

  “She’s cleaning, Mom. And she’s not cheap. She’s with an agency.”

  “An agency.” Mrs. Trueblood brought her legs around and put her feet on the floor. “Get my coat. I’m not going to allow this.”

  “I got the number out of your desk.”

  She stood, and he took her by the upper arms to steady her. “Mother, please!” he said, low.

  “Are you sleeping with her? You’re sleeping with her.”

  “She comes over during the days and cleans and she goes home in the afternoon. I’m not—for God’s sake I’m not—I’m paying her thirty dollars a day to clean up the mess you made. No, I’m not sleeping with her, and I wish I was.”

  “What did I do?” she shouted. “I went to high school and I got married, and I loved you! I gave everything to you! You get her out of my house! I will not have that woman in my house!”

  “Mom—what’re you talking about? Please. It’s me, Anthony.”

  “I will not have it! You get her out of my house!”

  “Hey,” he said, “look—” He reached for the cup on her nightstand, pulled his car keys out of his pocket, and tossed the cup in the air, then the keys, caught and tossed them again in little flips, up and down, just in front of her face, just enough for her to know. “See? It’s me.”

  Her eyes followed the objects, and then she sat back down and put her hands to her face. “Stop it,” she said. “I can’t see. What’re you doing, for God’s sake. I can’t stand it.”

  The nurse had come to the doorway. Her expression was pure detached interest. He put the keys in his pocket, set the cup down, and got his mother to lie back on the bed, murmuring softly that there was no woman at home, nothing to fear, everything was as it had been. She lay stiffly, arms tight at her sides. When he looked at the door the nurse was gone. He turned to his mother. “I’ll take care of you,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about a thing.”

  He had to pass Mr. Gray on the way out; the sun had moved, and Mr. Gray was leaning farther into the window well, straining. The sight made Trueblood miserable. Driving to the bank, he saw his own life stretching forth ahead of him: against this dreary picture, he strove to imagine that he would get to know Lynn Bassett; they would find that they had common hopes, the same insecurities, even the same daydreams; they would marry, and the years would give them happy, summer days with children running on summer lawns. He would be a clown at all the birthday parties, juggling for them and for all the neighborhood children. He would overcome his shyness and become a teacher. His mother would get past all this anger and sorrow, and be a grandmother, at peace with her difficult history.

  It was hard not to think of happiness as a place, some distant location to which he had been denied a passage.

  He tried to dispel all thoughts of the future.

  At the bank he handed the check through the window and waited. The teller, a middle-aged lady with a tall tangle of dyed blond hair and silver-framed glasses that glinted in the light, stared at the back of the check for some time, then gazed at him with a perplexed and slightly miffed expression. “I don’t understand,” she said.

  He said, “Excuse me?” Then: “Oh, I’m sorry. I guess you need some identification.” He brought his wallet out, retrieved his driver’s license from it, and set it down on the counter.

  She motioned for another teller to come over to her, a man perhaps ten years older than Trueblood. The man took the check, examined it, and said, “What do you want us to do with this, sir?”

  “Cash it,” Trueblood said. “That’s my mother’s signature on the back. I forgot to sign it myself, but there’s my driver’s license, and if you’ll loan me a pen I’ll sign it.”

  The man pushed the check across the counter. “We can’t cash this as it’s endorsed. Even if you endorse it.”

  Trueblood held the check and read the finely scrawled letters where his mother had written on it. Fuck This Boy.

  He folded it and put it into his shirt pocket, behind the checkbook. Then he put his driver’s license back in his wallet. “She’s—she’s in the hospital,” he said. “Please forgive me. I should’ve looked it over more carefully. My mother’s not—not doing very well. If you’ll excuse me—”

  Ridiculous.

  He drove around aimlessly, looking at the busy streets. At a traffic light, he sat repeating the words she had scrawled, his own mother, and abruptly a laugh rose up out of him, a spasm—a sort of nervous fit. He couldn’t get his breath, so he pulled over to the side of the road, resting his head
on the steering wheel, the laugh taking him down and down again, until he saw little floating asterisks of nonlight in his field of vision. When he had gained some control, he sat straight, held up one finger as if to emphasize something to a crowded room, and said, “Now there’s an idea.” Then he put his head down once more, laughing so deeply that his chest hurt. Finally, he was simply sitting there in the idling car, quiet, with a headache and a sore throat, watching the traffic. He remained that way for the better part of an hour, as if to move at all required some strength the laughter had taken from him.

  The blue van was still there when he pulled up in front of the house.

  She was in the dining room, putting dishes away. He walked to the entrance of the room. “I’m back.” It felt so natural.

  “I heard you.” She was on her knees, stacking washed plates in the credenza, a white bandanna tied around her head, a dust rag jutting from the back pocket of her jeans. There wasn’t going to be any more to do. He went into the kitchen, poured himself a drink, and stood at the window there, sipping it, watching the progress of fleecy dark-lined clouds massing in one quadrant of the sky. The drink burned his throat. He couldn’t suppress another laugh, thinking about what he had been through.

  She called from the other room. “What’s funny?”

  He went into the living room, sipping the drink. “You wouldn’t believe it.” The little sounds the two of them made, he in his room and she in hers, were quite pleasant, he felt. Something shifted in his chest: it occurred to him that he didn’t even know if she was married. He gathered all his will, and walked in to her. She was almost finished.

  “How’s your mother?” she asked in the tone of someone inquiring out of politeness, who doesn’t expect a detailed answer.

  “The doctors say she’s getting back to normal. I don’t see it.”

  A moment later, because the silence was growing awkward, he said, “Haven’t you worked here before? I found your number written out on a piece of paper in my mother’s desk upstairs.”

  “I never worked for your mother, and from the way this place looked, no one else ever did, either.”

  He took a little more of the drink. “My mother’s having psychological problems …” Even as he recognized the inexpressiveness of this, he couldn’t find the words to describe the situation without seeming to take away Mildred Trueblood’s dignity.

  Lynn Bassett said, “You suppose I could have something to drink?”

  “Oh, of course—forgive me.” He went into the kitchen and poured her a whiskey. He was surprised to see that she had followed him. She took the glass, wrinkled her nose at it, and said, “I just meant a Coke or something.”

  He poured the whiskey into the sink, rinsed the glass, then thought better of it and set it down, reached into the cabinet, and brought out another. “I can’t believe how nice everything is,” he said. The only soft drink in the house was orange juice. He poured her a glass. They stood a few feet apart with their drinks. He looked around the room. “Yes, you’ve done a very good job.” He stole a glance at her as she drank, and the lines of her face seemed very slightly ill-proportioned—something about the curve of the nose, or the eyebrows. Her upper body was set down into the square hips. In truth, she was not really very appealing to look at, and this heartened him for a moment. But then he turned in himself and was appalled at his own mind. He reflected that perhaps, after all, he was not a very good person.

  “Thanks for the juice.” She walked into the other room. He heard her putting her things away. He hurried to the front hallway, and waited. She came in with her bag over her shoulder. “I guess that’s it. I stayed later because I saw that I could finish today.”

  “You wouldn’t like more orange juice?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks. I worked an extra hour, so let’s say forty dollars.”

  As he brought the checkbook from his pocket, she stooped to pick up something from the floor, and he realized with a start that he had dislodged the check on which his mother had written. As Lynn Bassett handed it to him, she took a small step back, her eyes widening an increment. He did not think she could have seen what it said, yet he was certain something about her expression had changed.

  The only thing for it was to explain.

  “My mother,” he said quickly. “Her idea of a joke, I think. That’s how she signed it. As I said, she’s been a little unbalanced.”

  “We’re hurting for money,” the young woman said. “I’m hurting for money.”

  “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life,” he told her.

  “Embarrassed …” She seemed at a loss.

  “What my mother wrote on it. See?” He held it out, and stepped over so that she was at his shoulder. “That’s what I was laughing at.”

  She didn’t react at first. She seemed unsure of what was expected. Finally she lifted her eyes to his face and said, “God almighty.”

  “I gave it to the teller like that. I didn’t see it.”

  “It’s a wonder you didn’t get into some kind of trouble. That sort of thing could get you into a lot of trouble. I hope you know that.” Then she laughed. Her face changed, brightened, and the laugh came, and he laughed with her. They stood close in the light of the picture window and went on laughing, for what seemed a long time. A wonderful interval that brought him close to crying for happiness. “I was daydreaming,” he said. “I just walked up to the counter and handed it to the lady and stood there like an idiot. The most ridiculous thing. And they looked at me as if I had two heads or something.”

  She kept laughing, gazing down at the check. “Man. That must’ve been something.”

  “I was daydreaming about you, actually,” he heard himself say, unable to believe he had said the words. But he could feel the rightness of it; this accident. This was the thing that would give them to each other, this comedy of the check, their laughter over it. They might talk about it in later years. “I had—I was daydreaming about how it is with you in the house. Like we live together or something.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She’d stopped laughing. “What,” she said, without inflection.

  “I mean—I—” he stammered. “I was thinking about you. I wasn’t—and I handed this over to the teller, you see—the funniest thing—” He halted.

  She put one hand to her mouth, and seemed to frown. “Forty dollars, please. Or my brother’ll come over here and beat the shit out of you.”

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “I’m telling you the truth, man.” She stood there. “So you better listen.”

  “Oh, I’ve got the money. I didn’t mean anything—my mother’s gone off the deep end,” he found the courage to go on. “Really. Crazy. They’ve got her on the psycho ward at Fauquier. You should’ve seen what I went through today. I had to do my juggling act to get her to recognize me.” Now he felt as though he had betrayed his mother, or belittled what she was suffering. And abruptly he no longer cared. This was what had happened to him and he had borne it all so patiently, and only a moment ago they had been laughing together, and if he could only get that back. “That’s what I’m dealing with,” he went on. “Can you imagine it? If you could’ve seen the look on that lady teller’s face—”

  Lynn Bassett regarded him with an expression he couldn’t read. “Look, I’m sorry I said shit. I hate cussing. But I can’t have a customer making passes at me. Did you—did you say juggling act?”

  He thought of demonstrating for her, then decided that it might frighten her. “Yes,” he said. “I taught myself, with balled-up socks from the laundry when I was a kid. It’s really very easy once you get the hang of it.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Well—I’ve gotta get going. Forty dollars.”

  “Do you—do you live with your brother?”

  “I’m trying to make enough money to go back to Montana. I came from Montana. If I can save a little and get free and clear, I’m gone. But I got roped into coming down here because I ran out of funds an
d he offered to put me up if I helped him, so I’ve been helping him. He gives me food and a place to stay if you want to call it that, and forty dollars a week, which doesn’t exactly make for a lot of leftover cash accumulating, you know? I came down here between semesters and never went back. It’s been almost a year.”

  “I just quit graduate school,” he burst out. He was having trouble moving enough air to speak. “I couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” It occurred to him that he did know. He said, “It all seems like such a waste. If you don’t have anybody to share it with—you know—”

  “Well, anyway,” she said, taking another step back from him. “You can always make a living in the circus.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “The juggling.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Of course.” He smiled. “I could show you how it’s done.”

  She seemed to wave this off, then held out one hand. “Anyway—forty dollars.”

  He fumbled with the checkbook. “Please forgive me.” As he wrote the check out, he said, “You’ll come back next week?”

  “Next week?”

  “I’d like to hire you to come regularly,” he said.

  “I’ll say something to my brother.” There was such discouragement in her voice that he almost touched her shoulder. Instead, he held out the check.

  “You did a wonderful job.”

  “It’s just cleaning a house. And God knows I don’t have anything ehe to do.”

  “Wonderful,” he said, before he had quite understood her. His heart leapt. “Would you like to go out to dinner or something?”

  She said, “What?”

  His breath caved in. He straightened, felt a band of pain across the small of his back, the muscles tightening there. “I wondered if you might like to go have dinner or something. I don’t mean it as a pass at you, really. I mean I’d like to be friends.”