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

by Richard Bausch

  He picked up A Doctor Looks at Calvary, ran the palm of his hand over the cover, looked at the title page, and then put it back again.

  Everything was so orderly in the pages of a book.

  He got himself ready for bed, knowing he wouldn’t sleep for the fluttering in his stomach. Lying down, folding his hands across his chest, he said his prayers and waited to fall off. Brief dreams of marriage, of trouble with shadowy figures, of boylike men in suits that looked too big for them, of Alice in odd incarnations—one had her wearing a police uniform, directing traffic—kept him stirring. It was impossible to concentrate on the prayers. Then his mother was banging on the wall.

  “What?” he said, sitting upright, trying to see.

  “Do you want me to go to this party? I mean, is that your vote, too?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Right. Yes. My vote.”

  “That’s such an odd way to put it. Isn’t it?”

  “She’s nervous,” he said.

  “I’m not criticizing her.”

  “No, I know,” he said.

  “Okay, then. I will. I’ll go to the party.”

  He lay back down.

  “Do you think they’ll have cordials?”

  “I don’t know.” He was sitting up again. He listened for her.

  “Good night,” she said.

  “Good night.” He settled back and began the long wait for sleep.

  Chapter 5

  That awful Friday in November, almost a year ago, when the news was official, the president was dead, he had walked up to Saint Matthew’s with Alice and another girl, a friend of hers who was visiting from Chicago. It seemed that the thing to do was get to a church, and so they had gone to the cathedral, walking through the slow, quiet rain and the widely separated tolling of the bells, and at Saint Matthew’s they had knelt in a back pew, the three of them in that big, empty expanse of shadows and empty rows and wavering votive candles. At the front of the church, a lone man knelt, a brown presence—brown hair, brown suit, light brown raincoat draped over the communion rail. He sniffled, and the sound rose into the high, dark, hollow, central nave. Then he stood, a tall, balding-at-the-crown, barrel-chested man, and turned from them, gathering his coat, sniffling. Abruptly, he cried out, “Why?” his sobbing voice repeating in the heights above him. “Why?” he cried again. And then again, “Why?” He kept shouting into his own echo, lurching heavily, almost staggering, to the back of the church. “Why?” he demanded. “Why?” Finally, he pushed the doors open and was gone, off into the tolling darkness, still sobbing.

  Marshall, having witnessed this from his place, kneeling between the two girls in the second-to-last pew, put his face in his hands and began to cry. He had a cold. He had been nursing a sore throat, a runny nose, a cough. His nose was dripping, the air passages closing off as he wept, and Alice’s friend turned to him, offering a handkerchief. He took it and blew his nose with it, since at the moment that was his most pressing need. He had thought she meant for him to do this. He folded the handkerchief, then, and tried to return it to her, not quite thinking clearly—the knowledge that she would not want it now coming to him in precisely the moment that she said, “You keep it,” holding her hands, fingers together, palms toward him, as if to help push the thing back in his direction.

  “Thank you,” he murmured.

  And they had said, really, nothing else to each other. Alice and she were going to the airport, where the friend was to board a plane to go home.

  That weekend, Marshall and his mother spent long hours in front of the television set. There were stark pictures of the arrival of the casket from Dallas—men lowering it from the back of a truck, Jackie and Bobby Kennedy stepping down from there and moving through the crowd of suited men to the waiting hearse, Jackie with bloodstains all over her leg, her face drawn and pale and stunned—and there were reports from the scenes in Dallas as Lee Oswald was brought out into the light, handcuffed, with a swollen left eye, surrounded by shouting policemen and television people.

  Did you kill the president?

  No, I’ve not been charged with that. In fact, nobody has said that to me yet. The first thing I heard about it is when the newspaper reporters in the hall, axed me that question…

  These scenes were talked about and analyzed, and replayed, and then there were biographical films about the president. The film narrators talked about his determination, and the fact that he was in pain most of his adult life. They showed clips from his news conferences, and played back his inaugural address. And then there was Vice President Johnson, standing with his wife in the glare of camera lights on the airport tarmac, speaking slowly in his Southern accent into a bank of microphones:

  This is a sad tam…for awl people. We have suffered a loss…which cannot be weighed…for me, it is a deep, pers’nal tragedeh…I know the world shares…the sorruh…that Mrs. Kennedeh and her fam’ly bear. I will…do my best. That is awl…I can do. I ask your help…and God’s.

  The cameras showed every stage of the casket’s progression to the White House, that Saturday morning, and then the former presidents and the members of Congress and the dignitaries from around the world filing in to pay their respects. It rained all day, and for a while a satellite hookup showed a memorial service being held in England, at Westminster Abbey. And then Sunday morning, after Mass, Marshall and his mother came back to the apartment to find that Oswald had been shot. The television newspeople showed it several times, once in slow motion, and they talked about how the unthinkable had become reality, how the nightmare only seemed to be getting worse. This was played against the images of people crying in the streets as the cortege made its slow progress down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. The young man and his mother numbly watched it all, and said very little to each other. When Jackie walked to the casket with Caroline, and kissed it for the last time, the two of them wept together. And on that sunny, cold Monday, when the actual funeral Mass took place, they watched and prayed with the others on television. Jackie knelt to take communion, and there was a strange solace in seeing it.

  “That poor girl,” Marshall’s mother said.

  As the procession moved through the streets and on toward Arlington Cemetery, she made tea, and poured Drambuie into it. She asked Marshall if he would like some. “You’re only eighteen, I know. But these are special circumstances.”

  “Yes,” he told her. “I will have some.”

  She made it for him, and measured out the Drambuie with a teaspoon. They drank it quietly, watching the ceremony at the grave site, and when the planes flew over, Marshall went outside to watch them come roaring overhead in the wide, white-streaked blue, making their long turn back to the north. Watching them, he couldn’t help feeling that everything would be different now, that some chance had been lost forever. He went inside and had more of the tea and Drambuie, sitting in the living room with the television and the voices of newsmen murmuring through the ritual. When it was over, he and his mother had a small meal of sandwiches, still drinking the tea. They sat across from each other at the kitchen table. By now she had stopped measuring the cordial and was pouring it into his tea in the same quantities as she poured it into her own. He noticed this, of course, but said nothing. He was beginning to feel the alcohol, and he liked the sensation. She made another pot of tea, and they sipped it with the Drambuie. The sun had gone down, and for a time they sat in the increasing dark, talking.

  Or, rather, she talked. She told him about being a little girl during the Depression, in rural Virginia, and about meeting his father, fresh off a ship in Norfolk, handsome and gregarious, proud of his navy uniform and his war record. He had done brave things in the war, she said, and it hadn’t finally mattered in the way he was allowed to live his life. She said this, and then she seemed to decide against saying more. The young man pressed her, hungry for any detail about his father. “There’s no need,” she said. “It’s done with. You and I did all right. We got along.” She had never blamed the old man for
leaving, because things would have been worse if he had stayed.

  When it was almost too dark to see, she got up and turned on the ceiling light, and together they did the few dishes.

  “You’re a good man,” she said to him. “To stay in all weekend with me.”

  He kissed the side of her face.

  “Let’s have one more cup of tea.”

  “Okay.”

  They sat at the table again, quietly sipping the hot tea. Marshall noticed that his eyes stung from all the television.

  “I still don’t believe it,” his mother said.

  After a pause, he told her about the walk up to Saint Matthew’s in the rain, the way the bells kept tolling, and how quiet the people in the streets were. He went on to describe the scene at Saint Matthew’s, the huge silence with its small echoes of their movements, the sobbing man, the way his anguished question reverberated in the spaces above them, and how after the man had left, their own emotions had taken over. Then he told about using Alice’s friend’s handkerchief to blow his nose. “She’ll be telling that years from now,” he said. “How this guy blew his nose into a handkerchief she’d offered so he could wipe his eyes, and how he tried to give the thing to her when he was through. That’s what she’ll remember. Me with my runny nose.” His mother stared at him for a moment, and then she laughed. He was startled, but he began laughing, too, as she continued. They went on helplessly, almost feverishly, for what seemed a long time.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it. The thought of you trying to give it back to her. I shouldn’t be laughing.”

  “No,” Marshall said. “It is funny. I can’t believe I did it.”

  They had gotten control of themselves, they were breathing, wiping their eyes. She lighted a cigarette, and sighed the smoke.

  “I still can’t believe it. Even after all that pomp and ceremony.”

  “What did you think of Cardinal Cushing?” Marshall asked her.

  “I didn’t think of him.” She laughed. “I mean—I’m sorry.” And she laughed again.

  “No,” Marshall said. “Isn’t his delivery strange?”

  She kept laughing, and so he broke into an imitation of the cardinal’s odd intonations. “May the—aw—angels, deah Jack—aw—lead ye-ew—aw—into pa-ra-doise. May the—aw—saints—aw greet ye-eew at yoah co-a-ming.”

  His mother put her head down on her folded arms, laughing.

  “Isn’t that it, though?” Marshall said. “I don’t mean any disrespect.”

  She tried to speak to him and went on laughing, and so, because he had the ability to, he repeated it. “May the—aw—angels, deah Jack—aw—lead ye-ew—”

  “Stop it,” she said. “Please. You sound just like him.” She got up and went into the bathroom and closed the door. He heard her coughing and trying to breathe.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  She opened the door and came out, holding a cloth rag to her mouth. Her eyes were glazed over with tears, and at last she took his arm and said, “You’ve got to be careful making me laugh that hard. I’m afraid for my heart.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I wonder where you get it.” She coughed. “Ah. Oh, Lord. I feel guilty laughing at a time like this, but you sounded so much like him. Where do you get that ability from? I don’t have it, and your father certainly didn’t—”

  “I shouldn’t’ve done it,” he said.

  “No,” said his mother. “We needed it. Don’t you apologize.”

  He had gone to bed that night with the Drambuie swimming in his blood, and the stark, black-and-white images of the weekend running through his mind. He was sleepy enough, but was a little afraid to try, given the dizziness he felt. In those moments just before he drifted off, he saw again the footage of the dead president’s inaugural address—

  Let the word go forth, from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.

  And this was when the idea came to him—part of a wavering dream in half sleep, but registering somewhere deep, amid all the terrible pictures of those four excruciating days—that he, Walter Marshall, might pick up the torch.

  “You told her about us?” Alice said. “And she didn’t react?”

  “Well, she reacted.”

  “Tell me everything she said.”

  “She didn’t have a lot to say.”

  “Then she didn’t react.”

  “I don’t know how you mean ‘react.’ She heard me. I could tell that it got through to her what I was saying.”

  “But you don’t remember what she said.”

  “What could she say? I told her about it, and that was that.”

  “Was she happy for you?”

  “I think so, sure.”

  “Did she say she was happy?”

  “Alice, I just told you, she didn’t have a lot to say.”

  “She hates it,” Alice said. “She hates the whole idea. She threw a fit and you don’t know how to tell me.”

  “She did not throw a fit. Anyway, she’s not the type of person who throws fits.”

  “Then she brooded. She got quiet and wouldn’t talk to you.”

  “No,” he said.

  “But she was upset, wasn’t she?”

  They were in the mailroom, next to the collating machine, a series of paper trays on a long steel bar that ran with a noisy clatter of metal and sucking of air and shuffling of paper. Above them was a large, many-paned window, and the crossed patterns of elongated shade gave the area a barred look, as though they were the inmates of a cell. Because Marshall’s supervisor, Mr. Wolfschmidt, was seated at the desk nearby, they were speaking in low tones while Marshall put more paper in the machine.

  “Well?” Alice said. “Tell me.”

  He looked at her, at the small lines of worry and distress in her face, and thought about how she was older than he. “What about you?” he said. “What did your father say?”

  This seemed to stop her.

  “I bet he threw a fit.”

  “Then your mother did throw a fit.”

  “She did not.” He had said this too loud.

  Mr. Wolfschmidt looked up from his desk, then leaned toward them slightly, lowering his glasses to look over the frame of them at Alice. “Something you need, young lady?” he said.

  “No, sir,” Alice said.

  “Move along, then,” he said, waving her away. “Shoo.”

  She looked at Marshall. “See you at lunch?”

  He nodded.

  “We’ll talk,” she said.

  He remembered what he had to ask of her, and his smile felt forced. He tried to mean it. She smiled back, reached over, and patted his hand. As she had when she had first stepped into the room and faced him, she touched the tips of her fingers to her lips and blew a kiss at him.

  There was a scary fluttering in his stomach. He started the machine and it made its loud gear-cranking, whir and hiss. For a few seconds he lost himself in the sound. He began taking the collated pages out of the last tray, and when Wolfschmidt approached, crossing through the barred shadows from the window, the movement startled him into a small shout. Mr. Wolfschmidt pushed the button on the machine, cutting it off, and stood gazing at him, his heavy, dark-haired arms folded. “Girlfriend?”

  Since Wolfschmidt had rarely spoken to him beyond the simple one-word commands necessary to the smooth operation of the mailroom, Marshall was too surprised to answer right away.

  “This girl—you and she are friendly.”

  He nodded.

  Mr. Wolfschmidt smiled. “Boy meets girl,” he said, unfolding his arms and making a small pantomime motion, as though he held a bowl in one palm and were stirring liquid in it with the index finger of the other hand.

  “Yes, sir.” Marshall smiled back.

  “Boy meets girl, romance and flowers, ja?”

  He nodded again.

  “Fa,” Wolfschmidt s
aid, and suddenly, “I thought so. You will please carry on your love affair outside this office.” He continued standing there regarding the young man as if there were something amusing, or even heartening, about him. The tone of his voice was sour and unfriendly, though. “You understand me?”

  “Yes, sir,” Marshall said.

  “Very good. We should not be wasting time with such things during working hours, should we?”

  He gave what he supposed was the required nod of acquiescence.

  “She is a very good-looking young girl, you think?”

  Again, he nodded. This was the longest conversation he had yet had with the man—except the first one, when he had been hired.

  “You like all the girls, ja?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And they like you. I see you with them in the lunch hour.”

  In fact, Marshall had made them all laugh, imitating Mr. Wolfschmidt’s voice and accent, acting out the sale of a tank to an Englishman.

  “They like you, ja?”

  “Sir?” he said.

  “And you like them. I see you watching them, when they come down the hall, outside there.” Mr. Wolfschmidt pointed to the doorway. “You like to look at them?”

  Marshall felt the need to deny this. “No,” he said.

  “You don’t like looking? You are punishing yourself, then.”

  He couldn’t answer. It seemed to him that the older man had perceived something about his makeup. His mother had recently said that he must learn to stop punishing himself. “I don’t look that way,” he got out. “The way you mean.”