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

by Richard Bausch

  “Honey, do you mind if I don’t go with you tonight? I want to go home and tell my father.”

  Honey.

  The word dropped into him like something heavy dropped into a pool of standing water. “Of course,” he said. “That’s—that would be fine.” In fact, he had never wanted more passionately to be alone. He thought of trying to find a way to tell his mother, everyone else he knew. If he were going to go through with it, everyone would have to know.

  “Oh,” she said, still holding his hands. “And did you really ask me to marry you?”

  He nodded, wishing she would stop making such a fuss.

  She leaned up to kiss him.

  “Not here,” Marshall said.

  “You’re shaking. Look at your hands.”

  He held them out in front of him.

  “That’s so sweet. It’s going to be just fine, darling.” She threw her arms around him.

  “All these people,” he said.

  “I don’t care,” said Alice. “I don’t. I’m so happy. Oh, this is the closest thing to heaven.”

  “I feel—me, too.” His voice caught on the last word, and it came out falsetto.

  She laughed softly. “You look like you’ve just had the fright of your life.”

  “It’s that cigar smoke,” he said for lack of anything else to blame it on.

  She touched his face. “I love you.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I—I’m the same. I feel the same.”

  “I can’t eat another bite.”

  “No.”

  “You, too?”

  “Right,” he said.

  “When will we do it?” she asked.

  He said, “Do it?” His heart jumped.

  “Get married.”

  “Oh—as soon as I can get a good job, I guess.”

  “No,” she said. “You have to go on to college, like we planned.”

  “You want to wait until after I finish college?” He felt a moment’s relief from the increasing pressure inside his backbone.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I don’t want to wait that long.”

  “Right,” he managed.

  “Do you?” she asked.

  “Do I what?” he said. Then, “Oh, that—no.”

  “I’d like to help you get through school.”

  “Right.”

  “Well,” she said. “What about after you finish radio school, this June?”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “A June wedding.”

  “Right.”

  “Would that be nice?”

  “Wonderful,” he said.

  She gazed at him. “That’s why you were so agitated all evening—you were trying to get up the nerve to ask me.”

  He nodded, utterly hopeless now. He would have agreed to anything.

  “You sweetie.”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “And listen, I want you to know something. I’ll convert. I’ll be Catholic so fast it’ll make your head swim.”

  This struck him as an uncannily accurate and discomfiting description of his present condition. And there was this cramp, high up in his back.

  She kissed him on the side of the face. “I know you have to go to school. I’m going to go home and set my father on his ear. Sure you don’t mind?”

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  After a pause, she said, “You must want to spend a little time alone, too. I mean that’s perfectly understandable.” Then she murmured, almost to herself, “Alice Kane Marshall. I like the sound of it.”

  “I can’t eat any more,” he told her.

  “Oh, who can eat?”

  “If you two would get out of my way, I could,” said the man with the cigar.

  Alice said it was like being in a movie. Marshall reached into his pants pocket for his money, and found nothing. He tried the other pockets, and he went through the pockets of his coat. “My money. I had two twenty-dollar bills.”

  She took his coat and looked through it. There was something motherly about the way she looked at him, turning the coat in her hands. “Nothing.”

  He turned and bent down to look under the stool and along the floor.

  “Walter Winchell,” Alice said. “He must’ve stolen it off you.”

  He dug down in the pockets of his pants again, and looked in his wallet. There was the driver’s license, with smudges on it.

  “Walter Winchell, the crazy with the signboard,” she said.

  “The money was in my pocket under my coat.”

  “Here,” Alice said, shaking her head, reaching into her purse.

  Briefly, it was as though they were already married—had been married a long time and she was vaguely impatient and unhappy with him. She gave him a ten and six ones, and put a five on the counter. “You wanted to help the poor, and I guess you did that, all right.”

  “It’s gone,” he said.

  She smiled. “You’re something.” Her new confidence had changed her, and he didn’t know how to behave under its influence. He put his coat on and she was already buttoning it.

  “Let me,” he said.

  “Stand still,” she told him. And when she had accomplished her self-appointed task, she patted his chest. “There.”

  Out in the street, she said, “You haven’t ever really kissed me.”

  “No,” he said. “Right.”

  She seemed to puff up with something. It was as if her face abruptly expanded. “Walter, are you just going to stand there and say ‘right’ over and over?”

  He was feeling the cramp now in his lower abdomen. She reached up to kiss him on the mouth, a bumbling embrace. She stood on her toes, and moved her head from side to side, her thin arms tight around his neck. After what seemed a long time, she stepped back, becoming several inches shorter in the instant of dropping down to her heels. “I love you,” she said. In the unreal light her face looked stained. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow,” he told her. “Yes.”

  He watched as she made her quick way through the throng of people on the sidewalk, instinctively understanding that this was expected. Occasionally, she turned and waved to him, going away. He waved back.

  He had not meant to act selfishly, or foolishly.

  The mist was turning into rain. He looked down toward K Street for a moment, but she was gone, and it was done. He, Walter Marshall, four months shy of being twenty years old, frightened and alone and worried, the victim of a pickpocket, standing in the wet street with money given to him by this young woman, was completely unable to imagine how it could have happened that along with everything else, he was now engaged to be married.

  Chapter 2

  The young man had imagined his own future, over the past year—down to the wife he’d have. His wife, the probable First Lady, would look something like Natalie Bowman, the girl at school. No, that was not the truth (how easy it was to lie to oneself!)—the truth was that the probable First Lady in his day-dreams was Natalie Bowman. He had spent time with her waiting for classes to begin, and they had talked, mostly about the weather outside the window of the library—the end-of-summer heat, the cooler, late afternoons of September, the days growing incrementally shorter. On occasion, he had clowned for her and made her laugh. She spoke with the slightest trace of an accent, now and then pronouncing the letter w with a “v” sound, and sometimes she let words drop from her speech, minor lapses that charmed him and brought his attention to the wonderful shape of her mouth, the way her deep green eyes changed when she smiled or laughed. To her, he was an amusing boy, a pretty prize for someone younger. He had filled hours at work planning things to tell her that she might find funny, working through what he would do to amuse her, keep her sitting with him in the little library room. It seemed that there was always something about to pull her away from him, something drawing her on, associations he could never fathom. There was an air of mystery about her, as though she were somehow marking time, waiting for some element of her present existence to relea
se her. An aspect of her attention was always elsewhere, and there were moments when she seemed rather gloomily distracted. When he could make her laugh, could break the spell, he felt strong and capable, felt privileged, in a way, though she never spoke about her moods, and seemed at times merely to accept his talk as though it were the natural and predictable outcome of his proximity. He didn’t care. He might have accepted much less to be allowed to remain in her presence. Her tall, lithe figure and her dark, aristocratic features reminded him of Jackie Kennedy, and she was Catholic, too. It had been easy enough visualizing his first lady as being that very girl, that dreamy, complicated girl.

  On some school nights, walking past the shopwindows with their mannequins in all the poses of self-assurance and grace, he had let his fancy roam over the great possibilities, going so far as rehearsing the phrases of what might one day be an inaugural address. It was a way of idly passing the time, though he was serious about it, too, and often caught himself hoping the world wouldn’t change too much before he could get there and deliver his speech.

  My fellow world citizens, ask not what we can do for any one country but what together we can do as a country for the whole world.

  Mrs. Alice Kane Marshall.

  The sound of it was all wrong, wasn’t it? Walking in the rain toward school, he tried to picture her as a wife, and could only see Jackie moving gracefully through the rooms of the White House, as she had in the television special about the history and the refurbishing that she had been engaged in. Alice Marshall, First Lady. It was absurd. He wasn’t even old enough to vote yet, and there was something sinful—wasn’t there?—about this kind of daydreaming. The whole thing made him queasy.

  He walked along the street in the increasing rain, reasoning with himself: Alice was older, and knew the way things were; he would never intentionally hurt her feelings, and she must know that, too. If he ever did get to be president, he would reward her hugely. He would tell the whole world what a good friend she’d been, since the early days…

  Except that he was engaged to be married to her. He was going to marry her.

  He went on up Eighteenth Street. The streetlamps sent their glow up into the heavy sky, showing the mist, the moving tag ends of clouds. In the window of a clothing store there was a photograph of Kennedy from the side; he was sitting at a polished desk with a window behind him, writing something, his face careworn and intent. Marshall looked at the gray cloth of his suit, the striped shirt cuffs coming out of the sleeves. “This blazing talent,” Stevenson had called him. Kennedy. In 1956, during the televising of the Democratic Convention, Marshall had seen him for the first time, standing at the podium behind a dense thicket of microphones while the thousands cheered. The boy, then eleven years old, had asked his mother who the man with the funny hair was. “That’s John F. Kennedy,” she had said. “He’s going to be president some day.” Such a handsome man. Marshall had to suppress the wish that time might hurry. It would be good to get beyond the present. He felt caught in it. Briefly, he saw his own flag-draped casket borne by a horse-drawn caisson down Pennsylvania, all the leaders of the world in tow. Perhaps the flag would be the flag of the United Nations.

  My fellow citizens of the world…

  “Oh, stop it,” he said aloud.

  The quality of light behind him changed with the headlights of a passing car, and the ghost of his own reflection became visible in the glass, just at Kennedy’s shoulder. He could not understand what Alice, or anyone else, for that matter, could possibly find attractive about that skinny face. It’s familiarity made him move away from the window. He had a vision of himself standing in an open place with someone, his grown son. He saw himself opening a door, and Alice waiting on the other side, with children.

  Oh, Walter. I’m going to go home and set my father on his ear…

  He walked on, trying to will the images out of himself.

  The radio-school classes didn’t start until six-thirty, and occasionally he stopped for a while at Saint Matthew’s. Though it was raining and the walk took him half a block out of his way, he headed there tonight. One of the priests had been a friend of his mother’s in her high school days, and was sometimes in the church on weekday evenings. Father Soberg knew of Marshall’s once yearning for the priesthood, and had talked with him about seminary life, about the religious books the boy was still reading—The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola; the meditations of St. Francis de Sales; the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas; all of Fulton J. Sheen; some of Thomas Merton; even a little de Chardin. The priest had taken an interest in the young man, had given him some of the books.

  Now Marshall, pressing forward through the rain, wondered if Father Soberg would be in the church, and if it would be possible to tell the priest what had just happened. The rain was coming in a downpour, swept by gusts of wind. Saint Matthew’s Cathedral looked medieval, standing so tall in its little section of Rhode Island Avenue, a prodigious stone shadow on the wide glow of the raining city sky. He hurried up its marble steps, thinking as usual of the procession of famous people coming down in the chilly sun of that terrible Monday almost a year ago. Kennedy’s funeral. Everybody important in the whole world, it seemed. Movie actors and the leaders of countries, ex-presidents and royalty, princes of the Church. They had all stood on these very steps, and the navy band had played the song about those in peril on the sea.

  He opened the heavy wooden door and entered.

  Inside, it was warm, and there was the hum of the city all around, as if it came from the recesses of the high arches in the vaulted ceiling. The church was empty. He approached the communion rail and the votive candles, the first pew. Alice would never understand something like this. Here, close to the altar, one could breathe the tallow smell of the burning candles, and when the air stirred, it carried some suspirant redolence of the stone in the walls and the riblike supporting arches. The shadows clinging to those high spaces above the altar seemed to be attending to him. When he knelt down, the wooden kneeler creaked with his weight. There was an accepting quality here, in the silence, with its small stirrings of air and its icons gazing out of the gloom in their placid, finished sanctity.

  He could calm down, and decide how to proceed.

  The first thing, he knew, was that the feelings and the welfare of another human being were at stake. Someone he liked, whose affections he had sought. No, there wasn’t anything for it. If Alice wanted to get married, he would get married. Besides, somewhere far beneath the scared sense that he had begun something catastrophic he was still receiving that glimmer of an alluring aspect of the idea—its novelty. The strange, breathless thrill it had given him when she called him darling. Well, it had been like a thrill, hadn’t it? It had been like riding down a steep incline at tremendous speed.

  He folded his hands, bowed his head, trying to think about praying. But he couldn’t keep his eyes closed. At the front of the church, the crucifix cast its long shadow across the altar. It was almost life-sized, but was not, he knew, a true representation of Christ’s execution. He knew that to show the truth—to give the actual historical representation—would be far more terrible.

  He had recently read a book by a French doctor named Barbet who had studied the physical effects of crucifixion, using experiments with fresh cadavers. The doctor proved that if the nails had been driven into the center of the palm, as depicted in most statues, the body’s weight would have torn the flesh in the hand, bringing the nail out between the fingers and defeating the purpose of the execution. The book was filled with photographs and diagrams describing the experiments the doctor had used to make an accurate description of what Christ must have physically suffered at Calvary. And Walter Marshall, having read the book, was aware that the nails—the jagged, dull-edged, primitive spikes of Rome—had been driven through each wrist, just at what is called the median nerve, which, when frayed, as a sharp point pushing through the metacarpal bones would fray it, caused unbearable pain throughout the entire
body. Horrible pain all over, and never mind the thorns piercing the circumference of the head, the whip across the back, the hunger, the slow bleeding, the blows of the guards, the nail wounds themselves, the awful cramping of the diaphragm in the chest, causing the inability to breathe out, necessitating that the victim push up on the nails in the feet in order to reach a straightened posture and therefore end the cramping and be able to exhale and gain more air, gain more of whatever is left of life—the sight of the world, light, even in humiliation, exhaustion, and agony.

  He could get married. It was a small thing.

  He looked at the sorrowful face on the cross and tried not to think beyond that, tried to see into the spirit of the icon.

  they have numbered all my bones

  Sometimes, kneeling here thinking of Christ’s suffering, knowing the terrible reality of it and inwardly offering himself up to suffer, too, he had experienced a heightening of his senses. It was as though something washed over him inside, waves of velvet on all the inner surfaces. He had striven to divorce himself from this sensation, for fear of growing too attached to the feeling itself as pleasure, as something to be enjoyed with, and in, the body rather than as the simple, haphazard element of his continuing devotion to the will and majesty of God.

  It was all so complicated.

  Tonight, he experienced no stirrings of spiritual ecstasy. Tonight, he felt the smallest measure of distance between himself and the anguished shape on the cross. He said an act of contrition, having to repeat it several times, because, again, his mind kept wandering away.

  Lord, if I have sinned, please help get me out of it.

  He bowed his head, trying once more to concentrate. Everything was racing, and perhaps he had a fever, was coming down with something. He saw Alice in his mind, that look of painful anticipation on her face, and then he was looking at the shape of Natalie, as she stretched out in the window seat of the D’Allessandro School’s library.