Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea

by Richard Bausch

  Regarding Marshall’s own future, broadcasting was now the farthest thing from his mind. He had other, loftier, ideas, having calculated that in the year 1988 he would be forty-three—John F. Kennedy’s exact age when Kennedy had assumed the office of president. (It was difficult not to see significance in the fact that 1988 would be a presidential election year, too.) Since Kennedy’s assassination, he had dreamed about politics—“the honorable profession” Kennedy had called it—and had entertained hopes of following in the dead president’s footsteps. He felt something like a sense of mission about it, wanting to serve the people, as Kennedy had set out to do, although he had not given much thought to what the people actually might need in the way of service: Freedom, Opportunity, and Peace, of course…and jobs…less crime…and Medicare…and fully integrated schools, buses, and lunch counters. Integration generally. For real. An end to the nuclear threat. And security from the monolithic Communist plot to achieve world domination. He supposed that more definite ideas would come to him as he progressed. He considered that he was a patriot; he had recently described himself as an idealist without illusions, using the martyred president’s phrase, though again he was not certain about the meaning of the phrase as it might actually apply to him. What he knew for certain was that he desired the chance to risk everything for his country.

  And when 1988 did roll around, if he was a politician, perhaps he would be in a position to run….

  He told no one about his plan, of course—not really. Well, he had spoken of it to Alice Kane, the young woman who worked the mailroom with him at the Census Bureau, on Twelfth Street. When he came to the job, the summer before President Kennedy’s assassination, Alice was already there, working in another department. He’d met her in the cafeteria. They had been seeing each other for a few months now, “just friends” she said to everyone else, including her father, who ran the Washington bureau of the news for CBS. The fact was that there were a number of young girls in the building who liked Marshall’s company, and troubled to spend time with him in the dead hour after lunch on summer afternoons. He was what they called cute, among themselves: He had a way of paying such deep attention to them; they felt almost revered in his presence. Moreover, he was naturally rather funny; he could imitate the gestures and voices of others with startling accuracy—he did Dick Nixon especially well, and the speech about retiring from politics after California had the temerity to elect Pat Brown over him the year before last—and he told stories, mostly having to do with various embarrassments he had experienced while in school, all of which amused and diverted them and made them laugh. He understood in a visceral, unspoken way that to these young women, if he was lovable, he was also not a serious candidate for love-life, as they called it to his face more than once, and he was usually happy enough to play to their idea of him as the harmless young clown. This was the role he played with all the women he knew, including the German girl he saw two nights a week at the D’Allessandro School. With Alice, though, there had been a shift toward something more substantial; they had been taking lunch hours together, and on the days he didn’t have school, she rode the same bus with him into Arlington. They had talked about more important matters, like the future, his future. It was becoming clear that she looked upon him less frivolously than the others. As a person to tell serious things to, she was the logical choice (for instance, she was the one to whom he had described himself as an idealist without illusions). Four years older than he was, and better informed about certain things concerning world news, she seemed to admire his intelligence, his finer qualities—an obvious tenderness of heart, the high-minded sentiments, the will to improve himself. He had read War and Peace, for instance (it was an abridged version, but he had bought the paperbacks of the full edition, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, and he was several chapters into the first volume). Though Alice often teased him about the age difference, she had a way of seeming to hang on his every word. Once, in a strangely dolorous mood, she talked about what others might think of her, going around like this with a nineteen-year-old. This murmured confidence seemed to imply an invitation for him to reciprocate. And so he had mentioned, casually, but concentrating intensely on her face, that he was thinking of pursuing the presidency.

  “The presidency,” she said. “The presidency of what?”

  “The—the United States,” he said.

  “Really? You?”

  “Sure,” he said through a small gulp. “Why not?”

  “You’re too sensitive. And blunt. And you don’t have any money. I mean, being interested in politics is one thing—but gosh.”

  He had read somewhere that people thought Robert Kennedy was blunt. “It doesn’t always take money,” he said.

  “It helps.”

  “What do you mean, ‘blunt’?”

  “Blunt. Blunt. As in, you don’t have a lot of subtlety.”

  This did not sound good. He felt odd, having to pick through these thoughts while she watched him. He felt quite stupid doing it.

  “I’d have an easier time believing you were going to be a painter,” she said.

  He was abruptly pleased. “I’m color-blind,” he told her.

  “You draw good pictures.”

  True—though he had no feeling for it at all, nor the slightest desire to pursue it. “I’m not interested in art,” he said. “Not to do, anyway, like a career.”

  “Well, politics might be fun. I’m involved in some politics, you might say. I’ve been working for Civil Rights. We both live in what is still a segregated state, you know. Even though it’s against the law now. Do you believe in Civil Rights?”

  “I do,” he said. “Very much.”

  She was staring off. “Running for president.” She turned to him. “Stranger things have happened, I guess. Actually, now that I think of it, I’d have pictured you as an actor, or a comedian, like—I don’t know, the driving instructor guy, Newhart.”

  “Politics,” he said.

  As her eyes began to show belief in what he could one day do, he could not help feeling vaguely proprietary toward her. Perhaps it was just a matter of having one’s mind made up, but somehow the sense of his own excellent future made him expansive, almost self-assured. She seemed to think it was inevitable, going on about his strong principles and sharp intellect, his good sense of humor, the things he could bring to the profession. Clearly, she was impressed with him. He liked talking to her, sounding the depths of her admiration, and she was not afraid to advise him, either. According to Alice, he was spinning his wheels going to radio school; he should start college immediately. Her father had never attended such a school. And before becoming an important producer of news he had worked in several places as an announcer. He had a strong college education, and that was the important thing these days, though some of the men he worked with hadn’t gone beyond twelfth grade. There was a night school in the same building as the D’Allessandro School of Broadcasting, she said; she herself had attended the school two years ago. She had flunked out, because she could not get through the French or the math. (Courses designed to thin the ranks. They didn’t want you to finish college if you weren’t really up to it.) But he would do well at the night college, an intelligent, well-read young man like him, and then he could transfer his grades and go to a real school and get a degree. Just as her father had done. All a young man needed was a little push.

  “Right, Walter?”

  “I don’t even need the push,” he told her. “I’m way ahead of you.” Perhaps he could use radio work to help put himself through college.

  “If you get good enough grades,” Alice Kane told him, “you can get a scholarship. My father got a scholarship his second year.”

  “There’s some money,” he said. “A small inheritance.”

  “Really? Your father?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s a little money.”

  “You never said anything.”

  “It’s not much,” he said.

  This afte
rnoon, a rainy Monday in early October, she approached him at work and invited herself along to his evening of radio school. Earlier in the day, at lunch, they had run into Mr. D’Allessandro, who, when Marshall introduced Alice and mentioned in passing who her father was, became quite solicitous, asking Alice to come visit the radio school any time, wondering if she might want to come tonight, though any night was fine, any night would be quite all right for a person of her background.

  “Well, and actually I do know something about it, of course,” she said now. “I’ve been in real stations and watched how they operate. And Mr. D’Allessandro did say tonight would be good, too, didn’t he? I’ve been wanting to, anyway. What do you think?”

  Marshall sought vainly for something to say.

  “I was always curious about it when I was going to the night college. Is it all right? Or I could just go on over there myself—see you there, or something.”

  “No, we’ll go,” he said.

  The truth was, he liked the hours between the end of work and the beginning of school precisely because it was time to be alone, completely free of the requirements of his mother or Alice, or anyone else. He could spend the whole two hours imagining himself years older, a different man, established, someone with the power to do good things. He could look at the streets of Washington, D.C., conjuring up how it might change in the time it would take him to get where he hoped he would go. Or he could happen upon the German girl at her studies, and perhaps she would feel like talking to him. Her name was Natalie, and the sight of her took his breath away.

  “Won’t we have fun?” Alice broke in, a little doubtful, apparently seeing that he had drifted far from her.

  “It’s pretty miserable out,” he managed.

  “Gloomy weather always makes me feel sort of giddy inside,” she said. “I don’t think I know why, actually.”

  Actually. That was her word. It came out with an automatic flourish in her talk, like a form of punctuation. “Actually, I’ve been intending to try night school again myself.”

  He liked her, and had even found himself thinking about her when he was alone. There was something warm and welcoming in her dark eyes, and she had a strong sense of the ridiculous; she could make him laugh. She was very short and slight—the kind of girl who, as his mother had put it, was blessed with nice features, and would be pretty if she could only gain some weight. (His mother inclined to a sort of scary detachment about the way people looked or behaved: About the young man himself, she had said, “You’re not what I’d call extremely good-looking—you’re no movie star—but you’re nice and tall, and you’ll have rugged features when you get old enough. Also, you have good, broad shoulders and a nice-shaped head, so you shouldn’t let your hair grow. For that, you need to fill out around the face. Your face is too thin.” She said all this while gazing at his hair, which for some months he had been trying to comb like Kennedy’s. He couldn’t get it to behave; it was too curly, too wiry. “You do need to get wider in the face,” his mother told him. “And you will. Don’t worry, you will.”)

  Now, Alice Kane said, “Maybe it’s just that I think people are silly to let their feelings be influenced by the weather. It’s like deciding there’s something the matter with a person if she’s twenty-three and not married yet.”

  “I usually don’t even notice the weather,” said Marshall.

  “Did you hear what I just said, Walter?”

  “Well, I don’t let the weather affect me,” he said.

  “No. Usually you’ve got your head buried in a book. I think you ought to breeze through college.”

  Here was her bright admiration again. A grown woman.

  “You really don’t mind if I come with you to the school, then?”

  “It’s a long walk, too.”

  “I used to go to the night college there, remember? I flunked three courses, actually. I didn’t finish Beowulf and I couldn’t get past the verb ‘to be’ in French. And then college math. My God. I guess I should’ve done the French in high school, like everybody else. I walked into that room and everybody was speaking the language. I felt like saying—Hey, look, folks, if you can already speak frog, why are you taking frog 101?”

  “You said that?”

  “I felt like saying it. I didn’t say anything. My father’s always called them frogs, and I thought of saying something. But I sat there like a lump while they talked, and wondered if I shouldn’t get a passport or something—ask to speak to the American ambassador.”

  “And you want to sit through an evening of radio school?”

  “I thought it might be nice. See what they do. Anyway, I’ve been doing some sitting through things lately, if you know what I mean.”

  He did not know what she meant.

  She gave his shoulder a light punch with her fist. “Taking part in sit-ins, silly.”

  “Really?” He was fascinated.

  She smiled. “Well, we live in the old Confederacy.” She sighed, and seemed to consider. “Actually, there’s this place in Maryland, of all places. I went there with my family to eat crabs when I was little. It’s in Pope’s Creek. A sign on the door, big as life. ‘White Only.’ The sign’s not there anymore, but the practice sure is.”

  “I went there as a kid,” he said. “I remember it was—yeah, white only. I remember.”

  “Well, see?”

  “There’s a law now, though. They’re not still—”

  “Of course they are.”

  “But—what about the law?”

  “You’re sheltered.”

  “No,” he said. Though of course it was true.

  “Anyway, we’ll have fun tonight,” she said.

  “You sure you won’t be bored?”

  “I’ve always been taught that boredom is a personal failure. Look, if you don’t want me along, just say so. I’m a big girl.” She spoke briskly, with a clipped something in her voice. “I mean, we’ve been going around together and I don’t know what you do when you go to radio school, and Mr. D’Allessandro seemed so interested to have me come visit, and I thought I’d take him up on it, that’s all. It’s a chance to spend part of the evening together. Don’t you want me along?”

  “Of course I do,” he said. “I want you to have fun, though.”

  She patted his arm, smiling. “I’ll suffer through it.”

  The week before, Joe Baker had brought his wife in—a big, sorrowful-looking, soft-featured woman with mournful, watery blue eyes, who seemed to be trying to melt back into the elements that had produced her. There was a strange, withdrawing, shying-away quality to her actions, and she wouldn’t meet anyone’s gaze. Baker was cheery and talkative, and kept his arm around her through most of the evening, but the skin under his eyes took on an ashen, shadowed hue as he smiled, attending to everyone’s expression. His face shone, as if he had put on some polish and buffed it for the occasion.

  “I met Fanny in Alabama,” he said. “Didn’t I, honey?”

  She nodded.

  “I was in the guard.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “Fanny was living with her mother in Montgomery, but she’s from Boston.”

  “Yes,” Fanny said.

  “I like Boston,” Marshall said.

  “You been to Boston?” Baker asked.

  “No. I think it’s a good place. I follow the Red Sox.”

  “You’d like it,” said Fanny.

  “I went to school in Montgomery,” Baker said, “and did most of my growing up there. Pretty town. Or it used to be. But I hated it.”

  Marshall couldn’t help noticing that Baker’s wife kept wringing her doughy-looking hands in her heavy lap, staring down. And Baker went on talking, a man with a deep dread of silences, pauses. There was something mortified about both of them, really, as if they had been caught out in the open in each other’s company.

  “Fanny liked Montgomery,” Baker went on. “She’d go back tomorrow. Whole town’s coming apart, and there’s mobs in t
he streets, and she wants to live there.”

  “No one cares what I want,” Fanny said in a small voice, still looking at her hands.

  “That’s right, my love,” said Baker, smiling broadly, as if the whole conversation had been a joke.

  The feeling, all that long evening, had been one of acute embarrassment.

  Now, briefly, Marshall saw himself as being like Baker someday, trying to talk over any hesitation while others looked at Alice Kane and wondered. Oddly, he saw himself married to her; it was years later and he had come to whatever this was that Baker and his wife had come to, and all the others understood, in spite of everything he tried, that this was not what he had planned.

  He was ashamed of himself for having such ungenerous thoughts.

  At five-fifteen, they left work together and walked in a warm mist up Pennsylvania Avenue, toward the Treasury Department, the White House, and Lafayette Park.

  “Back during the war,” he said, “there were soldiers on the roofs of all these buildings.”

  “No kidding,” she said without interest. “What were they doing?”

  “Watching for German planes. My father was one of the soldiers. He had a guard post up on top of the Treasury Building.”

  “What a funny image—a man guarding all that money.”

  “He wasn’t guarding the money.”

  “I bet they all made jokes about it, though.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Marshall said.

  “I’d like to have heard him talk about it.”

  “We only talked about it once. He came back here when he was—when he knew he didn’t have long. You know. His heart was giving out on him.”

  She said nothing.

  “The whole time I was growing up I thought I should feel some anger against him for leaving us,” Walter Marshall said. “I was too young, and couldn’t really remember much about him. And so it wasn’t there—wasn’t in me—to be angry with him. There were pictures, but you can’t really take anything from a picture. A picture really isn’t worth anything when you don’t remember the face. And there were times when I wished I had him around, you know, but it never got to be something I was mad at. It was just what had happened to us all, I guess. And I guess my mother had something to do with that. Her attitude about it, I mean. Then, when he came here, somehow it was like he was this old friend of hers. I liked him, and—but I felt sorry for him, too, and couldn’t quite believe that’s who he was. My father. We came here, you know. He stood there by that statue and told me about how things were during the war. He said this was always his favorite part of the city when he lived here.”