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

by Richard Bausch

  “That’s what you should do,” Marshall told him. “Get mad.” But there was something reflexive in this, and he knew it. He almost apologized, watching his tall, gangly friend walk away.

  Mr. D’Allessandro wasn’t there, but he had left instructions with Wilbur Soames, who conducted things efficiently and with an edge of amusement. He and Baker were still telling jokes, back and forth, and they laughed at Ricky Dalmas reading his commercial for Gauss’s Funeral Home.

  You know, death is always inconvenient…

  “A masterpiece,” Soames said, laughing.

  Baker sat at the console, watching as Ricky concentrated on his copy, reading it in that strange, unmusical way. Marshall left early, claiming a headache, and made his way up the street to Natalie’s building. The city was disappearing in fog—a heavy, drifting haze settling from a dull sky. There was no light in her window. He waited for a few minutes, standing there almost invisible in the murk, while all around him sounded the rush and noise of the streets, lights moving nebulously through the thickness like aspects of the fog itself, a moving glow, a tattered scarf of light. She was nowhere, and she didn’t come walking down the block this time. He kept giving her another few minutes, kept expecting that she would, indeed, come from somewhere out of the shrouded distance. Finally, he gave up and walked down to K Street and the bus home.

  Alice had telephoned, wanting him to call her at home when he got in from school. She had spoken with his mother about Minnie, and in her sorrow had let it out about the sit-in, the violence, blaming herself for Minnie’s condition. Apparently, she wasn’t even aware that she had given anything away. Loretta felt injured, she told him, to have to hear this from Alice, realizing that the truth had been kept from her. “I thought we had something special,” she said. “I thought we could always talk to each other.” She sat at the small table in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and looking disheveled, worried, and sleepless. “I thought I could trust you.”

  “Of course you can trust me,” he said. “I didn’t want to upset you, that’s all.”

  “You have to promise me,” she said abruptly. But then she stopped, coughed, looked away from him.

  He sat down across from her. “Mom,” he said. “It’s fine. I didn’t—I felt—it was such an amazing thing. I felt so close to everyone and—”

  “Your father…” She stopped again. “You can’t do these kinds of things, Walter. You can’t go against the government or the police.”

  “It wasn’t like that,” he told her. “We were within the law all the time.”

  She shouted, “So was your father!”

  He had been startled by her vehemence, and he simply sat there looking at his hands on the smooth surface of the tabletop.

  “You have to listen to me, Walter. Your father did the same kind of thing. Exactly the same. He went against the government, son. Do you understand? He was very idealistic, like you, and he went against the government and they punished him for it. They came to that little two-bedroom house we lived in and they took him away. They took him away, Walter. You have to listen to me, now. They went through his books and his letters and tore the house apart looking for things. They kept him for almost a week, and it was for something he did when he was twenty-two years old. Do you see?” She got up and moved to the sink, poured a glass of water, and sat down again. “He belonged to a group of people, they used to meet on the weekends, and some weeknights, and it was all about justice and freedom. Everything was terrible all around. Nobody had any work, and he joined because the talk was about those things—food for the hungry and work for those who wanted to work. Good ideals like that. He went to a few meetings, and then he saw that they weren’t really talking about the same kind of justice, and he stopped going. I didn’t even know him then, son. It was before I met him, 1934, for God’s sake. And when you were a baby, the—the government people—they came and took him away and kept him all that time, days, asking him questions, grilling him about this little group, this—these few meetings that meant nothing and that he’d mostly forgotten about. They kept asking him for names. Names of people he hadn’t seen in almost twenty years. And, of course, he wouldn’t give them any. He told me he couldn’t remember the names even if he wanted to tell them. It was just these—these meetings he went to. Meetings, Walter, that was all they were.” She began to cry. She got up and pulled a Kleenex from the box on the counter, blew her nose, and sat down again, with the box. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Can you believe this? After all this time.”

  They were both quiet, then. Perhaps a full minute went by, while she sat there struggling to gain control of herself, and slowly succeeding.

  “He tried to tell me about it,” Marshall said, finally. “That time we went into town together.”

  She was wiping her eyes with the Kleenex. “I remember.”

  He thought about his father, imagined him young, saw again the memory of him in snow, wearing the dark green fatigue jacket.

  “When he came home—after the questioning—he was so frightened. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t relax anymore. He was afraid of the phone, the windows of the houses across our street. He couldn’t stay here. People were turning each other in, denouncing each other to the police, and he had been involved. He was guilty of what that McCarthy and all of them had decided was a crime. Do you see?”

  Marshall said, “He…” but nothing else came.

  “He went out to Arizona to start over. He was going to send for us, but then he couldn’t, son. He just—he couldn’t do it. It wasn’t in him anymore. He couldn’t—couldn’t bring himself to do it. He’d gotten so scared. And there were problems—other problems. This thing made them all that much worse. Some people pull together when things go wrong. This pulled us apart. It just did. And, anyway, I didn’t want to leave here. Not pick up and start over in a place like Arizona, so far away. No matter how beautiful he said it was. We—the two of us came to understand it, my darling, without ever really saying much. There was never any rancor or bitterness. We just knew. And—and the time went on.” She kept folding and refolding a piece of tissue, sniffling, daubing at the corners of her eyes.

  After a pause, Marshall said, “Well, but this—what happened the other day in Maryland—it wasn’t the same kind of thing.”

  “I know what you’re going to say, son. That’s what I’m trying to make you see. It wasn’t illegal—what your father did—it wasn’t really illegal, either, at the time. It was a thing that he got in trouble for years after the fact. That’s the way it is in this country. Different times tolerate different things. What was understandable—what was even laudible in 1934—becomes the reason you’re stripped of your job, your ability to earn a living, in 1951. You don’t know which way the country will go, do you? You can’t say that ten or fifteen years from now you won’t be hauled out of whatever home you’re in, wherever you are, and made to answer for this—this sit-in or whatever it was. You don’t know how things might change.”

  “Maybe we’ll change them,” Marshall said.

  “Don’t you think your father felt that way?”

  “This is different.”

  She stood. “Oh, for God’s sake—haven’t you been listening to me?”

  “Well,” he said. “It is different. This is about the right to be a full citizen. It’s the law, now, and there are people trying to subvert it or ignore it. We’re only applying pressure for people to obey the law.”

  “And when the law changes?” she said. “What then?”

  “The law won’t change.”

  She took another Kleenex from the box and moved to the sink. She stood there, her back to him, sniffling. “You have to promise me—” she said.

  “I can’t do that.”

  She turned, and she was angry with him now. “I wasn’t finished.”

  He waited.

  “Promise me you won’t—do anything dangerous or foolish.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  “This
is all Alice’s doing, isn’t it? Alice and her liberal father.”

  “Alice’s father was unhappy about it, too.”

  She sniffled again, and poured more water. “I’m going to bed. I won’t sleep, but I’m going to bed.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” he told her.

  She kissed his cheek, and he rose and put his arms around her. Her arms came around his middle. For a time they stood there. “It isn’t as if I’m not proud of you,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Don’t be up late,” she said. “Get some sleep.”

  They went to their separate rooms, and he lay awake, thinking about how this small apartment would soon be empty of them both—other people would live here, where he had for the most part grown up, living in what others must have seen as a kind of poverty, though it had never felt that way. His mother hadn’t owned a car until his thirteenth year. There had been times when she’d had to scrimp and save and had worried about things he came to know other households took for granted: There had been winter nights when they could use only one light in the apartment at a time; nights when they had eaten pancakes for dinner, or cereal, or bread and butter. Nights she had been up late, sitting at the kitchen table, working over the figures, trying to make the money stretch. Times he had lain awake and heard her pacing in the rooms, worrying. At some point in those years, she had developed the habit of cleaning house in those late hours. He could marvel now at this trait of hers, this abhorrence of idle time, as a manifestation of the hardships she had endured in the years after his father left. And it seemed to him that for all her worry and work, she was entitled to some happiness. How much he would do for her, in the world.

  He did not see Natalie until that Wednesday. Alice was in Arlington with Minnie. He spoke with her on the telephone, and he visited once. Alice kept the vigil, alone, mostly, sitting at Minnie’s side and holding her hand. When Marshall visited, Mr. Kane was there. Alice’s father was gruff, and barely polite, and when the opportunity for them to be alone presented itself, Alice took it, leaving her father and Minnie with Diane and two members of Minnie’s congregation. She walked with Marshall to the hospital cafeteria for a cup of coffee. “It’s just his way,” she told him. “You mustn’t take it personally.”

  “It’s hard not to,” Marshall told her.

  “Everything’s so sad now,” she said.

  He took her hand. He wished something would come along and sweep him away, out of the bounds of what he must do. “Alice,” he said.

  She had turned to look at the clock above the door. “They’re getting a little hard to deal with,” she said. “The hospital people. They want her bed. They can’t find anything wrong with her and there’s nothing she wants them to do. She’s just occupying the bed, you know? My father was arguing with them about it when you got here.”

  “Has she—” he began.

  “She doesn’t say anything now. She opens her eyes and looks at me and then closes them again. I can’t get her to say anything.”

  He was quiet.

  “They want to take her off the IV.”

  “What happens if they do?”

  “She’ll starve. That’s the only way she’s getting any nourishment.”

  They finished the coffee, and walked back up to the room. Patrick Kane was talking to Diane about the events in Maryland. It was a quiet, rueful conversation in which they were both agreeing that 1964 was far too late in history for such things to be happening so close to the seat of democracy. When Mr. Kane saw that his daughter had entered the room, his demeanor changed; he stood, cleared his throat, and muttered something about work piling up at the office. He nodded at Marshall as he left, and when he was gone, Diane said to Alice, “He’s proud of you. No matter what he says.”

  “Well, that ain’t what he says,” Alice told her with a rueful shake of her head.

  Marshall felt a surge of admiration for her. He watched as she took her place next to Minnie, and he saw the light in her eyes as Diane talked about Stephen and his journey south to join Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Stephen had promised to send them news of himself, and Alice hoped that a letter from him, perhaps with some small greeting from Dr. King himself, would be the medicine that Minnie needed. Marshall took his leave then, said good-bye to Diane and kissed Minnie’s cheek, feeling false, walking through the lighted corridors with Alice on his arm, taking her confident kiss, holding her while she fretted about Minnie and about everything else that was worrying her—her difficult father, the missed time at work, her engagement that was not going as she had always dreamed it would. “We should be going out on dates,” she said, barely able to control her voice.

  “I know,” he told her. “It’s all right. Don’t worry about it, really.”

  That Wednesday at school, when he saw Natalie, she was distant, almost standoffish. He had spent time dawdling in the stores leading to Eighteenth Street, looking at the paperback books in the racks, and he had stopped at Saint Matthew’s to pray, to ask for help for Minnie, and for Alice, and to plead for exactly the sort of courage he had come to understand he lacked. It was a clear, cold sunset, and stars were already glittering on the edge of the sky. He met Natalie in the school library, where she had been studying, and when he spoke her name, she seemed startled.

  “I didn’t know it vas so late,” she said.

  “I have to tell you something,” he offered.

  “I know. You’re already engaged.”

  “I’m—” he stopped.

  “Mrs. D’Allessandro told me.”

  “I’m going to break it off,” he said, and felt oddly as though he were lying. Something stirred in the flesh around his heart, and he felt sick.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Maybe sometime we can go together and talk. Not now. If Mrs. D’Allessandro sees me talking to you—” She had put her coat on and was gathering her books. “I can’t talk to you right now.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “What about Mrs. D’Allessandro?” He took her by the arm to stop her. “Natalie—”

  “No, please. This is not good.”

  He let go. “Then—you’re not—we’re not—”

  Her response was a little like that of a teacher talking to an infatuated student. “This is all for a later time. We vill maybe see each other later, yes?”

  “Later. When, later?”

  “Just—later. Not tonight and not tomorrow, either. After—” She stopped, gave forth a small sigh of frustration, then seemed to decide something. “After the big radio thing, vith Brightman, okay? I’ll see you sometime after that, and ve talk it all out. Now I have to leave. Please.”

  He watched her go down the stairs, into the darkening street and on, taking the opposite direction from the one that led to her apartment building. No doubt she was going to her job, yet he had the feeling she was walking out of his life forever. He hurried to the doorway, and called after her.

  “What?” She had gotten almost to the end of the block, was only a slender shape there in the dimness. The light of the streetlamp there seemed to send down a solid wall of illumination at the edge of whose border she stood.

  “You’re coming back?” he said.

  “Don’t be silly, Walter.”

  “I take that as a definite yes.”

  She waved this away, then crossed the street, hurrying now, disappearing into the dark.

  “Natalie,” he called.

  Nothing.

  The D’Allessandro School of Broadcasting was in session, but Mr. D’Allessandro was not in his office. Marshall went back down to the night school and along the corridor of classrooms, looking for Mrs. D’Allessandro. She was standing at a blackboard, talking about Beowulf to a room full of drowsy-looking men and women. She saw him, excused herself, and came out into the hall, closing the door behind her.

  “This better be important, young man.”

  “You told Natalie about Alice Kane,” he said.


  She nodded. “Frankly, I was amazed that you hadn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We need Alice Kane to be happy with us, remember?”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with this—”

  “Of course it does. Now run along. I have a class to teach.”

  “Alice’s father wants to call the thing off,” Marshall told her. “And it has nothing to do with Natalie and me. And I hope he does call it off.”

  She straightened a little, and all the color left her face. “What did you say?” Then she grabbed him by the arms and held him there, looking up and down the corridor. “This has gone far enough. He can’t call it off. It’s done.”

  “Stop,” he said. “I have to go.”

  “Did you tell this to my husband?”

  He thought of telling her what he had seen between her husband and Mrs. Gordon, and his mind reeled with the spitefulness of it. He said, “Look—it’s not certain. I was going to see Mr. Brightman myself, and try to fix things.”

  “You’re going to see him.”

  “I was going to try to fix it,” he told her. “I just don’t understand why you had to ruin things with Natalie like that.”

  She was looking down the hall, still gripping his arms. Then she looked straight at him. “You’re not ruined. Trust me. Natalie is just—there’s a situation with Natalie.” Now she stepped back from him, her hands dropping to her sides. “Natalie has some things to tell you, too. Can’t it wait? That’s all. Just let it wait until Alice Kane’s father delivers Mr. Brightman to us. Nothing can upset that. Do you understand? Or we’ll lose everything.”

  “I understand,” Marshall said.

  There was the sound of footsteps on the stairs, steady but slow, and Albert crossed the hall, heading for the basement. He looked at them, seemed to squint, held one hand over his eyes like someone peering through bright sunlight, then gave up and went on his way down. They listened to his descent.