Living in the Weather of the World

by Richard Bausch

  Delia looked at him with interest. He wondered what his father had said to her. She was not quite three years older than Brayton himself.

  Finally, after a shallow hour of calling him Drew, and avoiding the subject of why Drew was not apparently interested in some one woman, the old man drove his wife and daughter away, Delia making the little girl wave from her child’s seat in back.

  —

  HE’D KEPT THAT IMAGE for a time. The little sister’s uplifted hand in the window of the car. The very heart of possibility. And as the years went by he thought of her now and then, imagining her growing into a teenager, growing up in that house with Brayton Sr., with his heavy judgments and his temper, and Delia, who had seemed so fragile and worried. But he could never see Katie as anything but that little girl. Alice’s children, two little boys and a girl, were not much older than she. How strange to think that the little girl straining to put her hands in the water of the fountain in the lobby of the Peabody was another sister. And grown now.

  Alice lived in Brooklyn. And because he used to bring the children stuffed toys and performed little magic tricks—disappearing coins and multiplying veils—he was a favorite uncle. He loved them and had learned to disregard Alice’s load of sorrow at his life, just as she and her husband had brought themselves to the point of being glad to have him in their home.

  Many times when he was with that little family he felt good. In a way it was like throwing something back at the darkness all around. As there were pockets of the burning Middle East that were still locked in the eighth century, so also many places, most places, in his own country were still mired in 1955. He had said this as a joke at their dinner table one night, and she got up and went into the other room, holding a napkin to her face. Her husband, Leonard, a kindly diminutive man with slender delicate white hands, shook his head and concentrated on his steak. He worked as a salesman of hospital supplies.

  “I thought it was funny,” Brayton said. “She knows I’m joking with her.”

  “She’s been moody,” said Leonard. “Means so much to her. We keep praying for you.”

  “I’m fine,” Jacques Brayton said. “Really. More than fine. Couldn’t be better.”

  “She worries.”

  “Tell her not to worry.”

  —

  THEIR FATHER AND KATIE’S MOTHER, as far as he knew, were both alive and well in Memphis. He knew from her letter that Katie had finished her degree at Boston University and had been in New York for more than a year. He and his father hadn’t spoken in a long time—not even to argue anymore. Everything between them had drifted to silence. But she was a grown somebody, blood kin, and he was curious and nervous, too. Actually quite nervous. This struck him as having unexpectedly to do with his father. He could not explain it to himself otherwise.

  He used to meet a man named Clovis at the Empire Hotel lounge, and sometimes Clovis would already have a room. Brayton’s life had been spent going from one to another of these kinds of affairs—his own version of serial monogamy: everything carefully arranged and brokered for safety. He was all right with it. While you did not have a choice about your sexuality, there were many choices about how you lived the life given to you. He liked living alone. He went out when he wanted to and he kept his private affairs to himself. It had been several months since the last. The high school at which he taught English was in Clifton, New Jersey. There was a woman in Clifton he saw platonically. They went to movies together, or to dinner, or just out for drinks in the late afternoons after meetings. They seldom spoke about their personal lives.

  —

  AT THE HOTEL RESTAURANT, he found a band playing loud while a woman stood on the piano stool wearing a skirt whose hem came only to the top of her thighs. She bent over to slam the keys, exposing her whole backside in black frill-bordered panties. Her playing was fast, loud, highly skilled, and aggressive. Brayton understood that it was not really about the playing, but about the standing on the piano bench in that way, wiggling to the boogie-woogie. He stood in the entrance and looked for the ball-shaped blue woolen hat, and there it was, in the far corner, near the windows looking out on Sixty-Third Street. He went to the table and she stood, tall, slender, with a face that replicated her mother’s. He could not convince himself it wasn’t Delia.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hello.”

  There was a moment of deciding whether or not to embrace. “I’m afraid I got soaked,” he told her, and she helped him off with his coat. Finally, he took the step, and she put her arms out.

  “Mom told me to look for a tall man with grass-green eyes.”

  They sat across from each other. “I could just have looked for your mom.”

  “People say that.” The piano player’s antic singing was filling the place, so they had to shout to be heard.

  “You see why I wanted to sit away from the piano.”

  “She’s good.”

  Katie smiled and took off the hat.

  “It’s hard to believe you’re here,” he said.

  “I have a vague memory of you, you know. Those Peabody Ducks.”

  “You wanted to get right in that water with them.”

  The waiter came. He had a faintly sour expression—someone just awakened from a nap. Brayton asked if red wine would be all right, and she smiled. He ordered a bottle of Bordeaux, and an appetizer of steamed calamari for himself. She asked for a shrimp cocktail. He looked at her hands, the bones of her wrists. She was very thin.

  “So, how are your parents?” he asked.

  She looked at him. “The same. They never change.”

  “Does Dad know you’re seeing me?”

  Her smile was quick, and then it was gone. “We don’t talk that often.”

  “I haven’t spoken with him in forever. I don’t know how long.”

  “We haven’t been much of a family, have we?”

  “I’m pretty certain that’s been his choice, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Well, people make allowances, don’t they?”

  “You’d say that about him?”

  “I don’t know. He likes things smooth.”

  “Pardon?”

  “I meant he never talks about what he feels. Never anything about himself. The world is going to hell—you know. Nothing about himself.”

  “Tell me about yourself.”

  She hesitated. The waiter brought the wine and then had some trouble opening it. Brayton said, “You want me to do that for you, son?”

  But the waiter got it open, thanked him anyway, and poured the taste. The wine was soft and tannic. “Good,” Brayton said, nodding.

  The waiter poured it, set the bottle down on the table, and walked away. Brayton lifted his glass and shouted against the music, “To families everywhere.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” There was something barely controlled in her voice, a tension that gave it the faintest tremor. Probably it was having to talk so loud to be heard.

  Again, he said, “Tell me about yourself.”

  “Not much to tell. I grew up an—an only child. Graduated from Boston. I have a job in public relations at Harper.”

  The music stopped, and the singer was talking about taking a break.

  “You’re in publishing?” Brayton asked, happy about the quiet.

  “Well, no. Marketing, really.”

  “But in publishing.”

  “Lowest of the low rungs on the ladder, you know. I’m just starting.”

  “Well, but that’s great. Do you think you might want to get into the editorial side of it?”

  “I took a publishing course in Vancouver last summer. So, sure, maybe. I don’t know if I’m smart enough.”

  “How did you do in the course?”

  “It was fun. I did well.”

  “Then there you are,” he said.

  “And you teach English, I think?”

  He regarded her, taking in the kindly smile.

  “Mom said she was pretty sure you teach Engl
ish.”

  “I’ve been at the same school since before you were born. In New Jersey. Clifton.”

  “I have a friend from New Jersey. She’s an older woman. Mom’s age. But nice. I met her in Vancouver, if you can believe that.”

  “Small, small world,” he said. But he thought about how immense it was, how a man could have a sister he has seen only once before in his whole life.

  They were quiet, sipping the wine. He poured more for them.

  “So you’re working in publishing, and living in New York.”

  “I went and saw Alice in Brooklyn.”

  He waited.

  “I wanted to meet her. So I just went over there. And she let me in. She was pretty nice. I met her husband, Leonard. I liked him. I liked them both.”

  “I don’t see much of them since their children moved out.”

  “Alice was kind of stiff. Well, awkward. Nice, though. I think it was just awkward for her.”

  “It’s ridiculous, you know. After all this time. She’s like the Taliban.”

  “Well.” She poured more of the wine for herself and offered it to him. He took the bottle and poured.

  “Katie, you’re her sister, for God’s sake.”

  She gave him a strained look, then gazed out the window.

  “Nothing against Alice,” he said. “Nor any other Christians anywhere, elsewhere.”

  “You both hate him.”

  “The old man? Hate’s too strong a word. I wish him well.”

  “And Alice?”

  “Alice grieves for his soul. Alice is still angry at him. Alice can hold on to anger. Believe me, you’ve never seen anything like it. She’s like a character in a gothic southern novel. And me, well, to be absolutely truthful, I never think about him. He—we never could agree on some things. A lot of things. Important things about which he ought to know better by now. Let’s just put it that way.”

  “Alice grieves for his soul. And is angry.”

  “Well, Alice and Leonard are of a particular kind of Christianity. Jesus Christ as the celestial cop. She grieves for my soul, too.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s a burden we bear in silence.”

  “She showed me pictures of Dad when he was younger, with your mother. Your mother was very pretty. Alice cried showing it all to me.”

  Brayton kept silent.

  Katie stared into her wine. “She’s just this lonely old Brooklyn lady with a big mole on her neck who wears a scarf to church and shops with a metal wagon.”

  “Well,” he felt compelled to say, “don’t give her any political power.”

  The other shook her head and drank.

  “You’d think the divorce just happened.”

  She said, “I saw the wagon off the back stoop when I went out there to smoke a cigarette. Leonard was so sweet to me, but I had the feeling he spends most of his time watching sports and waiting for her to bring him drinks and food. I had dinner with them. There’s a crucifix in every room of the house.”

  “Oh, it’s definitely a Catholic house.”

  “They seem happy enough together.”

  “Habit.”

  “Does that invalidate it?”

  “Not at all. That’s absolutely the truth of it. Habit or no, it’s still a form of domestic bliss.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “Maybe I am, a little. Since that form of happy also allows for some pretty terrible habits of thought.”

  “Do you still go to Mass?”

  He shook his head, smiling at her. “Not since I left home for college.”

  “Alice and Leonard said grace. We held hands and it was like we were a family.”

  “You didn’t have that growing up.”

  “Not once.” She laughed that soft laugh he remembered from her voice on the phone.

  “No,” he said. “The old man’s never been much for that. The source of his many problems lies elsewhere.”

  “I used to wish I had whatever it was that made him and Delia so calm. Did you ever wish you had that?”

  “No.”

  “Well, your mother was a pretty woman.”

  “She still is. And as I said, she’s happy, too. At seventy-three, with her second husband. And of course Alice didn’t like him at first. Mother was living in sin.”

  “The phrase is funny isn’t it. Living in sin. Isn’t everyone living in sin?”

  “Everyone’s living in whatever weather there is where they are.” He smiled. And then caught himself wondering how much she knew about him.

  “It’s such a loaded phrase. Living in sin.” She took a long slow sip of her wine. “It always struck me as something religious women said about other women. Almost exclusively.”

  He said, “Someone should do a linguistic study.”

  “And you never were like that—that they were living in sin—about him and my mother.”

  “Never. Of course not.”

  “And I guess Alice is all right with it now.”

  “Well, Mom got a dispensation on some technicality, making her marriage to Dad invalid in the Church. Which made bastards out of Alice and me. But it saved the whole thing for Alice, and she could accept the old boy—Eddie’s his name—still without really liking him much. She’s a bit judgmental by nature. Which, of course, she got from Dad. Eddie’s all right, really. And he treats Mom like a queen.”

  “Funny,” Kate said. “This is the strangest place.”

  “Here?” He looked down and then back at her.

  “Earth.” She grinned.

  “And we walk up and down on it?”

  She nodded, gazing off. Then: “I didn’t know where to go.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing. Tell me about your life, brother of mine.”

  The wine was evidently going to her head. She took more of it.

  He glanced over for the waiter. “How long does it take to put steamed calamari and a shrimp cocktail together?”

  And as if what he had said called her forth, the singer walked up in her brief black skirt and fishnet stockings. He saw the black bow tie at her neck, the puffed white sleeves of her blouse. “Too early?” she said to Katie.

  “This is Lanelle,” Katie said.

  Brayton offered his hand.

  “Too early,” said Lanelle, sitting down.

  He stared.

  The waiter came over and gestured. She nodded. He went off. She turned to Brayton and grinned. “They know what I like here between sets.”

  “You sing and play wonderfully,” he said, and tried not to have it sound as empty as it did sound. He couldn’t take his eyes from her face. There was something slack in it, a kind of indolent watchfulness. He added, “I mean that. I’m very impressed.”

  “Lanelle’s my roommate,” said Katie. “That’s why I wanted to meet here.”

  He glanced at her, then regarded Lanelle again. “You in publishing, too?”

  She laughed. “Not so’s you’d notice. But it’s a pleasure to meet Katie’s brother, Drew. Long-lost brother, I should say. I think it’s great.”

  “Jacques,” Katie said. “Remember Alice said it’s Jacques.”

  “Oh, forgot—sorry.”

  “It’s been Jacques for about twenty-five years,” Brayton said.

  “I changed my name, too. Only I won’t tell you what it was.”

  “Edna,” Katie said, with a little nudge of the other woman’s shoulder. “Maybe we’ll all go get something in Chinatown after your last set.” She sounded younger, hopeful, and faintly pleading.

  “Sounds like fun.” Lanelle gave Brayton an appraising look. “You like Chinese?”

  “Very much.”

  “We love Chinese.” She touched Katie’s wrist. “Don’t we.”

  “I think I’ve got MSG in my blood,” Brayton’s sister said. The other had taken her hand.

  He leaned slightly toward her. “Am I to understand something here?”

  “Funny,” Katie said, without t
he slightest inflection.

  “Are you—are you on speaking terms with Dad?”

  She moved her index finger around the lip of her glass, staring at it. “Like you are, sure.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

  Lanelle touched his wrist. “It’s true, though, isn’t it? You see it on the news now. People talking the wave of the future, and famous people coming out and marriages in some states and you start thinking it really is changing. But there’s always the individual cases. Right?”

  He nodded, and drank the wine.

  She went on: “People like us still have to map read.”

  “Excuse me. Map read?”

  She looked at Katie. “I’m ten years older than your sister here.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  She gave him a sweet smile, charming and perfectly vacant. “Well. Thanks for the compliment. But really—come on. Haven’t you been reading the maps all these years? From your own kind of closet?”

  The waiter brought her a whiskey, neat, with a little cup of espresso. She drank the whiskey in a gulp, then sipped the espresso.

  “We live together as husband and wife,” Lanelle said. “Her family—and mine, too—don’t really know what to do with it.”

  “So you—you read the maps.”

  “We navigate the waters, yeah. But we’re out there in the sunny blue.”

  “I see.”

  “For love.”

  “Yes,” Brayton said.

  Lanelle repeated it. “For love.”

  He said, “I’m with you.”

  She finished her espresso, set the cup down, then stood and walked off. He saw her stop at another table and lean over to speak to the woman there.

  “You teach English,” Katie said to him. “What grade?”

  “Twelfth.”

  “Do the people you work with know?”

  He watched Lanelle go on out of sight beyond the bar. “I’m sorry?”

  “Do they know about you.”

  After a brief pause, he said, “Some of them, of course. Friends.”

  “Crazy, isn’t it.”

  “It’s the territory,” he said. “You know. Our schizoid country.”

  “You should do something where you don’t have to worry.”