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

by Richard Bausch

  “Wonderful,” Marshall said. “When?”

  “December seventeenth. Next year. December seventeenth, 1965. Maybe.”

  “That’s my birthday,” Mr. Atwater said.

  “Don’t you think that would be appropriate?” Loretta asked.

  Marshall nodded, a bit dumbly, he felt. But there was nothing he could think of to tell them. Mr. Atwater offered him a black Cuban cigar, which he refused, and Loretta poured champagne for them. “A toast,” she said.

  Atwater stood, the cigar in one small, white hand, and, waving it slightly so that the smoke curled about him, said, “To the marriage of true minds.”

  “True minds,” Loretta said.

  They drank. Marshall watched his mother, and tried to see through the rather frenetic brightness with which she moved and spoke. It was like looking at a stranger—someone imitating Loretta Marshall.

  “Things’re gonna change,” said Clark Atwater. “I do believe.”

  “Here’s to change.” Loretta drank.

  Atwater was looking around the room. “We’ll have to get rid of some of this stuff, of course.”

  “Well—” Loretta glanced at her son. “Let’s go over that sort of thing later. This is supposed to be a celebration.”

  “That is kee-rect,” Mr. Atwater said. “Don’t know what the hell I’m thinking of.”

  They’d been waiting for the young man to come home so they could tell him the news and drink the champagne. They had several glasses of it, and Atwater talked about the plans for next year, managing to imply that there was something tentative about them even as he went on about what would change. It was as though he were speculating about it all, woolgathering. Loretta kept steering him back to the present, to a happy contemplation of what a good time they were having. Finally, Mr. Atwater allowed that it was getting late. He was tired. He said good night to the boy and took Loretta by the arm. “Walk me outside, honey.”

  “I’ll be right back, Walter.”

  “She might not be right back,” Atwater said.

  “Clark—you stop that.”

  Atwater leaned in and kissed her on the side of the face, then burrowed into her neck. His glasses were pushed out of line, and it appeared for a moment that he might fall. But then he righted himself, and looked at her, blinking. “My sugar,” he said. “My angel of the night.”

  “Please, Clark.”

  “I’m going to bed,” Marshall told them. “Good night.”

  “I’ll be back in one minute,” said his mother.

  Atwater was pulling her to the door. “If she’s lucky,” he said. Then he stepped back from her and took a long pull on the cigar. “Loretta,” he said, the smoke pouring from him, “you look like a lady who’s engaged to be married someday.”

  “That’s me,” she said. “Come on, now.” She started out.

  At the door, Mr. Atwater turned and held up the hand with the cigar in it. “Good night, sweet prince,” he said.

  “Clark, please.”

  He laughed—it was a high-pitched, glottal sound, like a kind of throat-clearing—and tramped clumsily out the door with Loretta holding his arm, bumping along at his side.

  “Clark, maybe I should drive you.”

  “Don’t be r’diclous. I’m fine…”

  Marshall walked into his room and sat down on the bed. From the window came the muffled sounds of the city at night, and another, softer sound. Perhaps he had imagined it—that laugh, the small protesting voice talking through it. He did not look out the window.

  Perhaps fifteen minutes later, he heard the door of the apartment open, and he went to the entrance of the living room just in time to see her drop down, with an exhausted sigh, onto the couch. She closed her eyes, and was still for a moment, her thin legs outstretched, her hands resting at her sides.

  “I know you’re there, Walter.”

  He entered the room and sat across from her.

  “So, we’re both engaged now,” she said without opening her eyes.

  “He’s kind of indefinite about it.”

  “Well.”

  “You don’t seem so happy,” he told her.

  “I’m tired.”

  They were quiet for a time. He was biting his nails, looking at the room, the furniture and pictures on the walls and knickknacks on the surfaces, wondering what among these familiar things Mr. Clark Atwater would want to get rid of or keep, and thinking how everything was indeed changing, how he and she were in the midst of the change that would propel him away from her, out into the world.

  “Stop that,” she said. “You’re always fidgeting.”

  He put his hands in his lap.

  She sat forward, and looked at him. “You look worn out, son. What’s the matter with you, anyway? You’ve been brooding lately—”

  “There’s a girl at school—” he began.

  “Alice?”

  “No. That’s the point, see—”

  “Oh,” his mother broke in. “I think I do see.”

  Again, they were quiet.

  “I had a feeling. You just didn’t seem very happy or relaxed about Alice.”

  “That’s what I see now with you,” he said, too quickly and with too much force. “You don’t seem so happy about Atwater.”

  She put her head back. “Well, I’m not, I suppose. I’m past feeling like a teenager about it, you know?”

  “But if you’re not that happy about it, why are you doing it?”

  “Go to bed, son.”

  “You won’t even talk to me about it?”

  She had closed her eyes again.

  “It’s because he’s your boss, isn’t it.”

  “Walter—please. I’m very tired.”

  “But that’s it, isn’t it.”

  She looked at him. “Not entirely. Okay? I’m almost forty-five years old, and—and it makes sense. He says he wants to marry me, and it makes sense.”

  “It doesn’t make sense if you don’t want to do it. Are you—it’s—it can’t be just to keep him happy. There are other jobs…”

  After a silence, she said, “Anyway, it’s far into the future. It’s entirely possible he’ll change his mind between now and then.”

  “Will he fire you, then?”

  “Please go to bed, son. I’m really very tired, and I don’t want to talk about it. I like him, okay? He’s a bit of a jerk sometimes, but I like him, and he’s—he says he wants me to be his wife. The way things are, he could’ve been a lot less nice than he’s been.”

  “Yes, but you don’t really feel anything for him. You’re not going to do this to yourself—”

  She stood and moved to the entrance of the kitchen, talking. “That’s enough. This is nothing for you to concern yourself with. Now I want you to promise me you’ll make no trouble about it.” She turned in the frame of the doorway, and regarded him. “Promise me, please.”

  He said nothing. He couldn’t look at her.

  “Walter.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I hear you.”

  “Well?”

  “I promise.”

  “Good,” she said. “Now, would you like some tea?”

  “No, thanks.”

  After a brief pause, she said, “Go on to bed, son. Things’ll look better in the morning.”

  He said nothing, still sitting there.

  “You’ll be leaving me, soon enough,” she said, “and I don’t want to live alone.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you. What about you, Walter?”

  He looked up.

  “What’re you going to do about your own situation, regarding Alice?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I have to tell her, I guess.”

  “You guess.”

  He looked at her.

  “You don’t expect me to tell her.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “What’s the other girl’s name?”

  He told her.

  “Is she pretty?”

  “She’
s—she’s beautiful.”

  “You’ve decided on the basis of that?”

  “No.”

  “Does she feel the same way about you?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “You got yourself in a cute little mess.”

  “I know.”

  “Well—Alice is older than you are. She’ll get over it. We don’t really fit in with those people, anyway. For God’s sake, there was some man walking on his hands at that party, and nobody even paid any attention to it. Alice is a grown woman and she knows the score, I’m sure.”

  “The other girl—Natalie—is older than Alice.”

  His mother received this information with apparent calm. She hesitated for only a second. “Well, I do wonder what is going on with these women.”

  “I don’t have any idea,” he told her. “I said I’d marry them both, though, and now no matter what I do, somebody gets hurt.”

  “In other words, you’re having the time of your life.”

  “I hate it,” he said. “And I hate myself.”

  “No you don’t. You just think you do.”

  He shrugged. “I can’t seem to be—well—natural with people.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “I keep going in whatever direction they seem to want me to go. I keep trying to please everybody. It’s like I’m all air inside. Like I have no opinions or principles when I’m talking to somebody. That’s why I went to radio school, because Mr. Atwater said I should in that history class my junior year.”

  “And now you got yourself engaged to two women—older women at that.”

  “I think I’m in love with Natalie.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “And I like Alice.”

  “That’s nice, too.”

  “I’m serious,” he said.

  His mother left a pause. “I can’t believe they’re serious, to be truthful with you.”

  “And why is that?”

  “You’re still such a—such a kid, Walter.”

  “They’re serious, all right.”

  “Well.” She smiled at him. “You’re a very nice boy, of course.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Don’t be modest. It makes you seem—I don’t know. Priggish.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Look, Walter—this isn’t the Middle Ages, or east Tennessee, either. It’s 1964, and you don’t have to marry anyone if you don’t want to. Why don’t you talk to Father Soberg about it?”

  “I’m too embarrassed to talk about it. It was hard enough to confess it.”

  “You confessed it?”

  “Well,” he said, “yes.”

  Now she seemed about to laugh. “You’re—you—what sin is this, exactly?”

  “I lied to Alice. I’ve been lying to her.”

  “Because you didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”

  “I—Yes. I don’t know. I got her to fall in love with me—”

  His mother put her hand to her mouth, and spoke through her fingers. “Son—do you have any idea how silly this sounds?”

  He felt like sulking. “No.”

  “It’s not a sin to decide you don’t want to get married to someone.”

  “It feels wrong,” he said. “You don’t know Alice. She’s—her father—it would hurt her, that’s all. And I can’t bring myself to do it.”

  “So what’re you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. The D’Allessandros want me to wait until after the thing with Mitchell Brightman before I do anything.”

  “And what about this—Natalie person. Your second fiancée. What will she do when she finds out you’re already engaged?” His mother was trying not to laugh. Then she was laughing. “I’m sorry. You’ll—you’ll just have to forgive me. I had the thought of telling you—not to talk to any other women—at least until you’ve settled on what you’re going to do with these two. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m glad you think it’s funny,” he said, striving to seem offended. But he was pleased in spite of himself.

  “Go get your beauty rest,” his mother said. “You’ll feel better after you get some sleep.”

  He got up, walked over to her, and kissed her on the cheek. “Good night.”

  “Come here.” She reached for him, wrapped her arms around him, and put the side of her face against his chest. “My very sweet young man,” she murmured. “You’ve just got to stop taking everything so seriously.”

  In the morning, he found her sitting in the chair, her head back, mouth open, asleep. The vacuum had been run, and she had waxed the kitchen floor. He had heard none of it. He woke her, gently.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I was dreaming about your father.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Nothing to tell. He was standing in a room. We were in a room with a lot of people, and it was time to leave.”

  “Did you and he love each other when you got married?”

  “Of course we did. How can you ask a question like that?”

  He gave no answer to this.

  “It’s not the same, Walter.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Look—there were things about your father and me that—this is different, okay? And you’ll just have to take my word for it.”

  “When he was here, when he visited that time—I think he wanted to tell me something, and then decided he couldn’t.”

  She waited. “Well?”

  “I wondered if you knew what it was.”

  “It couldn’t possibly make any difference to you now, son. Whatever it was.”

  “Do you know what it was?”

  She considered a moment. “No, I don’t imagine I do. Your father—your father was a very disillusioned man. He desperately wanted you not to feel that way.”

  “What was he disillusioned about?”

  “Don’t you have to go to work?”

  “Tell me,” Marshall said. “You can tell me.”

  She sighed, then seemed to give in to something, lying back in the chair, her hands resting on the arms. “He thought the world was one way, and it turned out that it was another.”

  That time his father had come to see him, and they had gone to stand at the Treasury Building, looking down Pennsylvania Avenue, the old man talked about how seeing the flags on top of the buildings always gave him a sense of pride and hope. He was an old brown man walking carefully with a cane, and Marshall found himself unable to assimilate the fact that this was his father, the man who inhabited his one clear memory of a father—that figure in a green fatigue jacket, helping build the snowman. This man was gray-haired, and his bones were visible under the flesh of his face and neck. He had made a life for himself in Arizona, had taught history in a private school there. His failing heart had aged him.

  They stood beneath the statue of Alexander Hamilton and gazed at the city: a humid, hazy, July night, the air cooling gradually from the heat of the day. Looking past the ornate facade of the Willard Hotel on the left, and the tall, square tower of the post office on the right, they saw the creamy solidness of the Capitol building with its many columns, its fresh-washed look in the light, standing up out of the dark asphalt beyond the trees as though it were a painted backdrop—all that marble radiance, that majesty, at the end of the long, gray file of federal buildings and art galleries.

  “When you think of the people who’ve walked down that old street. This is where they carried Lincoln, his funeral, right down Pennsylvania to the Capitol. It gives you quite a feeling, standing here, knowing that.”

  The young man thought his father might say more, and when he didn’t, felt confused as to what was expected now, what one might ordinarily do under the circumstances.

  “I’m sorry, Walter. Here I am being the history teacher again.”

  “No,” the boy said. “Really. History’s my favorite subject.” Of course, history was not, and had not been, his favorite subject. He had spoken to spare his father’s feelings.

&nbs
p; The old man looked at him. “I guess we should be talking about where I’ve been for the past thirteen years.”

  “We don’t have to talk about that.”

  “Well.”

  They gazed at the long, wide street, the scene that lay before them, radiating up into the dark as in a dream. All the bright lines of the Capitol building were blurring; the surfaces appeared to be melting into the damp air.

  “This was all blacked out,” the old man said. “All this light. Look at it. All dark. We thought planes would come over. People were scared. Pearl Harbor was a big shock. People—people do things when they’re scared. We had guns on these roofs, and it wasn’t for practice. We didn’t know enough, couldn’t be sure. And we took steps. That’s how it happens sometimes.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It wasn’t like it is today, Walter, where you see Jack and Jackie on television all the time. We rarely saw Roosevelt, except in photos from the chest up. We heard him on the radio. There wasn’t anybody in this country who didn’t know that voice—but if you didn’t see the newsreels—everything was radio then. We’d gather around that thing in the evenings, the whole family, the way people used to sit by a fire. When you think about it, things have changed and developed so fast—that old feeling that we were all connected by the closeness of a voice talking, all in some enormous living room—that only lasted a few years. Television came in and that was the end of it. During the war, people depended on radio, every day. I was older, you know, and had trouble getting them to take me until later on—I was almost thirty, and had some limitations with my eyesight. But I got in. And I saw some of the war. I did my part. Whatever you may ever hear about me, son, I want you to know I loved this country.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Your mother says you were thinking about the priesthood for a time.”

  “I was going to the seminary, but I didn’t get in. My grades.”

  “Too much clowning around in the classroom.”

  “Yes, sir,” Marshall said.

  All the way here they had talked in a painfully innocuous way, like strangers, men in the uncomfortable vicinity of each other—about the always last-place Senators and the Redskins and the Bay of Pigs and the missile crisis.