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

by Richard Bausch

  “I am a chatterbox today, yes?” She took another bite of the sandwich.

  “It’s fine,” he said. “You know I like talking to you.”

  She licked one finger, swallowing. “You are a nice friend.”

  He drew in a breath to ask if she would like to go have something to drink with him, and then he remembered Alice again. She stood out in his mind like an accusation.

  “Where are you going to go, Walter? What will you do with your life?”

  “I’m thinking of going into politics.”

  “Politics,” Natalie said, putting her hand to her mouth and stifling a laugh. “Oh, no.”

  “I am,” he told her.

  This had the effect of making her nearly hysterical. “Politics. He is going into politics.”

  “Well—”

  “Maybe you will run for office.” She kept laughing. “Maybe you’ll grow up to be a powerful man. Politics. I don’t believe it—”

  He said, “What’s wrong with that? John Kennedy called it the ‘honorable profession.’”

  She kept laughing, trying to get her breath. “Oh, Walter. Ah. I’m sorry. Forgive—forgive me. I’m a magnet. I must have done something in another life—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She was still laughing. “It’s not funny, I know.” She held both hands over her mouth and seemed about to choke. “Please. Oh. It’s not the least—I’m so—ah-hah.” She breathed, then cleared her throat. “You must forgive me.”

  “I don’t see why it’s such a subject for hilarity,” he said.

  “Don’t be mad, Walter.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “It’s nothing to do with you, really.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  “No.” She took a breath, then started quietly to laugh again. “I can’t help it.”

  “Well, I’m glad you’re happy.”

  “Oh,” she said, “now his feelings is hurt.”

  “No,” he insisted. “I just would like to know what’s so funny.”

  She put her head down on her arms and seemed in the grip of a kind of seizure, laughing so deeply that the table shook. He watched her. When she sat straight again, her shining black hair was mussed and hung about her face. She threw her head back and ran her hands over it to smooth it, sighing. “Ah. My goodness. I’m so sorry, Walter, but you see the world is such an ironical place, really.” And she went on laughing into her hands.

  When at last she subsided, she reached over rather tentatively and patted him on the shoulder. “I vas thinking of someone else,” she said. “Really. You don’t want to know.”

  “I think every citizen ought to want to have some impact on the problems we face,” he said, mouthing the words of the late president.

  “Please,” she said, trying not to laugh. “Let’s talk of something else. Okay?”

  “Is it because you’re German?” he asked. “I mean, we all know the Germans aren’t great at politics. Not democratic politics.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “Is that it?”

  She tilted her head to one side. “No, I don’t think so.” And she began to laugh again.

  “I don’t understand you,” he said. Again he was sitting there helplessly watching her struggle with herself.

  She sighed, gingerly touching the corners of her eyes. “Please,” she said. “Never mind.”

  “Okay,” he said quietly.

  “No, Walter. I am sorry. You must please forgive me.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “My feelings aren’t hurt,” he said.

  She was taking some trouble to compose herself. She brought out a handkerchief and blew her nose. “I feel as if I have been running.”

  He left this alone. He was thinking that, anyway, he was going to marry Alice. He had asked her, and she had accepted, and that was that.

  “You are not here to study?” Natalie wanted to know.

  “I had to see Mrs. D’Allessandro about something.”

  She raised one eyebrow at this, but said nothing. He had the suspicion that she might be toying with him. After all, she was from another world, the world of grown-ups. The world of the memory of war, before he was born. It was ridiculous to think of her as he had been thinking of her, if it was not a sin.

  “You are not disillusioned, I hope,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  Now she seemed to be ruminating alone. She stared at the table surface. “Americans haf such a slow capacity to learn. They do. And they have such a big capacity to imagine. They are like little children.”

  “You’re an American,” he said. “Now.”

  She looked at him. “Well—not yet.”

  Mrs. D’Allessandro came laboring down the stairs with a box of papers and notebooks. Natalie hurried out to help her, and the two of them said their good-byes to Marshall, the older woman apparently having forgotten that she had offered him a ride to his bus stop. He stood on the landing and watched them pull away in Mrs. D’Allessandro’s beat-up car.

  Chapter 7

  Alice called him twice that evening to discuss plans. Her engagement had set something free inside her, it seemed, and she felt the necessary confidence to pursue matters that she might only have daydreamed about before. She told him this, and she told him how she had faced her father down about living her life as she felt she must. She was a grown person with her own opinions and values and she would behave accordingly. “I never thought I’d have the nerve,” she told Marshall, laughing softly. There was a note her voice struck in laughter, a lovely trill, of which she was unaware. She seemed, indeed, to be trying to stifle herself, holding back. She even apologized.

  “I’m just giddy,” she said.

  She had been in touch with Albert Waple, and had invited him and Emma to her birthday party, but then had decided it would be good to meet them both for dinner tomorrow, before Albert and Walter’s class. It was a perfect idea, but she wanted to be sure it was all right with Walter. He hadn’t made any other plans, had he?

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m so excited, Walter. The whole thing has a kind of—symmetry, doesn’t it? It’s perfect. It fits perfectly. I know, maybe we could have a double wedding.”

  “Well,” he began.

  “Are they Catholic?” she wanted to know.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Will I see you tomorrow for lunch?”

  “I have to eat lunch in the mailroom tomorrow. Mr. Wolfschmidt has a shipment of forms that have to be collated and sent out.”

  “What if I come to the mailroom and eat with you there?”

  “I don’t think that’s such a great idea,” he said. “You know how Wolfschmidt is.”

  His mother sat at the kitchen table, watching him talk. She seemed to study him. And when he hung up the phone she said, “Alice?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s no light in your face, son.”

  “Pardon?”

  “When you talk to her. I don’t see any light in your face.”

  “I’m not a lamp, Mother.” He was surprised at the irritability he felt.

  She put her cool hand on his forehead. “No fever.”

  “I’m all right, really.”

  He helped her with the dinner dishes and then sat in the living room with her while she watched television and drank cordials with her tea. The news showed Negroes running under a barrage of water from fire hoses. It was a report about the trouble in Alabama, two years ago, and resistance to the new Civil Rights law. She sipped her tea slowly, watching this without seeming particularly interested in it. The television, she had often said, was company. She seemed unaware of her son’s presence. He read from the book of President Kennedy’s speeches.

  Ladies and gentlemen of this Assembly, the decision is ours. Never have the nations of the world had so much to lose, or so much to gain.
Together we shall save our planet, or together we shall perish in its flames. Save it we can—and save it we must—and then shall we earn the eternal thanks of mankind and, as peacemakers, the eternal blessing of God.

  Reading these lines, the young man was abruptly assailed by the possibility that the world might somehow find a way to resolve its problems before he got the chance to be the person saying such things. And he had a moment of recognizing, with dismay, the prodigious solecism of the thought. He could not have expressed this in words, but he knew it was selfish and sinful, and he tried to put his attention on something else, after murmuring a prayer—against the urges of his secret heart—that the nuclear nightmare would end.

  How he hated these spirals his mind led him in, more and more.

  He understood that he was inclined to be overscrupulous, but there were times when he couldn’t help himself. His thinking tended in all cases to flow back to his faults: If he did something kind on the walk to Saint Matthew’s—stopping to talk with someone who looked to be in need, giving money to one of the men who lined the street across from Lafayette Park—afterward he would catch himself feeling generous and good-hearted for the kindness, feeling a kind of pride; and so then he would murmer the prayer of communion:

  Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed,

  and in the words as he gave them utterance came the sense of his own journey toward sanctity, like a healthy, bracing walk through rarified air. He would bask in the pleasure of this feeling until the thought struck him that the enjoyment itself could be construed as a form of hedonism, a kind of spiritual gluttony for the delectation of his own piety. This was followed by a heavy sensation of hopelessness about being able to truly purify his thoughts, and an attendant shock of realizing that now, after everything else, he was close to the sin of despair, the worst sin and the one for which there is, of course, no forgiveness.

  One evening, when Mr. D’Allessandro was late, and Albert Maples, Joe Baker, and Marshall were sitting in the basement by the vending machines talking about nuclear fallout and the end of the world, Joe Baker changed the subject by telling a joke about a young woman studying to be a nun:

  As she’s coming out of the church, she hits her foot on a rock, see. She says, “Oh, shit.” Then she says, “Oh, God, I said ‘shit.’” Then she says, “Oh, shit, I said ‘God.’” Then she says “Oh, fuck it. I was going to be an airline stewardess anyway.”

  As he laughed with the others, worrying about the words, the young man had a guilty moment of sensing that the joke was a rather painfully accurate portrayal of the kinds of mental tangles he was contending with, all the time. It was discouraging, and it distracted him now, trying to read Kennedy’s speech to the United Nations.

  “Stop fidgeting,” his mother said, pouring from the crème de menthe bottle.

  He went to bed early, and lay awake, hearing the rattle and tumult of the television, on into the night. It was still playing when at last he drifted off, trying to pray, his mind turning on the vague, unbidden hope that the world’s problems would wait for him, and presenting him with random images of the day he had just been through. He wished fervently that he was forty-five years old. Established. Questions answered, mind made up. All the necessary knowledge acquired.

  On the edge of unconsciousness, he had a brief sexual dream of Natalie, which woke him and left him trying again to pray, waiting, humiliated, for the effects of the dream to wear off.

  When he did sleep, he wandered through the other rooms of the house, and Natalie, all mixed up with his mother and Alice, was there with him in various states of undress. He kept shying away, and then running after them, and something in his soul—something that in his sleep felt as though it were the soul’s trembling, unappeasable center—acceded to everything, and wanted more. He came to himself in the early morning, sitting up in the bed breathing as if from long exertion, the sheets moist with the turmoil of what he had been through in the hours of fitful dreaming. He found his mother asleep in her chair, in much the same position as the evening before, though the television was off and the room had been straightened. The tea and the crème de menthe were put away. She had dusted and polished the furniture—you could still smell the polish—and placed his book on a small shelf above the television, where she kept her own books.

  He decided not to wake her, since it was clear that she had been through another of her restless nights. From the time he was small, she had been periodically subject to these episodes of sleepless energy, and he had awakened on some nights to find her in the middle of arduous and complicated tasks, which she defended with the assertion that she did not like wasting time, and wouldn’t permit herself to do so. In her mind, there could be nothing more useless than a wakeful, healthy person lying in bed. The hours of her day were therefore various and changeable, and he had long ago become accustomed to organizing his own life around hers.

  This morning, as on many other mornings, he brought a blanket in from her bedroom and put it over her. Then he got himself ready for work, and quietly made toast, which he left on a plate in the middle of the kitchen table with a note:

  School tonight. Don’t wait up if you’re sleepy. Love, Me.

  The bus into town coughed and sputtered. It would be another muggy, warm day. People sat quietly reading or looking out at the still-green trees lining Old Chain Bridge Road. The route took them through McLean, past Hickory Hill, where the former attorney general and his large family still lived, though Kennedy was now running for senator of New York. Marshall looked at the big house behind a wrought-iron gate. There were several black cars parked in front, and a big, oxblood-colored dog lay in the sparse dry grass of the lawn. At this stop, a nervous, wiry man always got on, having hurried down from one of the smaller houses on the other side of the road. Everything this man did was imbued with a kind of haste and worry: His thinning hair stood on end; his coat was missing a button or was frayed at the sleeves; his tie was always partly undone. He carried a newspaper rolled under one arm, and a thermos from which he poured himself coffee each morning, spilling it onto his fingers and into his skinny lap as the bus jarred over the uneven surface of the road. Marshall found that he couldn’t quite keep from attending to the various signs of distress the man showed, spilling the coffee or trying to get the paper unfolded so he could read it. Occasionally, he was late enough that the bus driver would have to wait for him, and on these mornings he could be seen turning briefly to face the little house from which he had come, waving at the very round woman standing in the doorway there, surrounded by many children of indiscriminate ages—they looked out from under her robe, from over her shoulders, from beneath her arms—all waving and calling to him.

  On the bus, he sat with coffee spattered on his coat, reading the paper, and Marshall would watch him, thinking about the sad-sack characters of the movies and television: Buster Keaton, and Jackie Gleason’s “Poor Soul.” There seemed something sorrowing in the face, a timid expectation of harm coming from some unforeseen quarter. Marshall resolved inwardly to find a way never to be this poor little rabbit of a man. Except that the man himself seemed quite content in his rushed, half-desperate condition, so that Marshall’s feelings were of a kind similar to the dread of nameless diseases, the unhappy fate that might befall a person unawares, that might reduce him into thinking that such an existence was a happy one, an end to be desired.

  This morning he saw not the little man, but himself hurrying down the black driveway from the little house, and it was Alice standing in the doorway, in the midst of all those children, waving to him, saying for him to hurry home. He thought he could feel how it must be to know that each day, every day into the years, would end with coming back to that house. Shivering, he looked at what was gliding by the window as if it might provide some avenue of escape, a way out of his own future.

  At work, Mr. Wolfschmidt was dour and distracted. Thousands of letters had to go
out to field representatives, and it all had to be done before the end of the day. Several of the boys from the stockroom had been drafted to help, and in the steady drudgery of the work, Marshall lost all sense of time. It seemed that not more than an hour had gone by before Alice was waving to him from the hall. He wondered why she had come down to bother him now, since Mr. Wolfschmidt was in such a bad humor and would surely have something to say. It was Mr. Wolfschmidt who brought him to the understanding that the day was over.

  “We don’t pay overtime,” he said, tapping his wristwatch with one forefinger and looking at Marshall with a censorious scowl. “Go home with your nice little girl.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Marshall. “I didn’t know it was so late.”

  “Time goes quickly when you’re having fun, ja?”

  Alice took his arm as he passed out into the hall. “I waited for you downstairs. For a while there I thought you’d left without me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  “I didn’t bring my car, so we’re going to have to walk.”

  When they got out into the street, and had gone a few blocks, she took his hands and pulled him toward a little alleyway between two buildings. They had just crossed in front of the Lafayette Hotel.

  “What is it?” he said. “Alice.”

  Out of view of the passersby, she let go of him and stood against the soot-colored brick wall. “You can kiss me now,” she said.

  “Now?” he said.

  “You want me, don’t you?” She reached for him. “Don’t hide it.”

  “Wait,” he said.

  “Open your mouth,” she murmured.

  He took a step back. “I don’t think we should.”

  “Why not? We’re engaged, Walter. Come on.”

  “I don’t think this is the time—” he began.

  “Oh, please,” she said, breathing, moving her hands along her thighs. “Kiss me like you mean it. I love you.”

  Again he put his mouth on hers, and her lips seemed to spread over the whole surface of his lower face. “Walter,” she said, pulling away. “I want you to really kiss me.”