The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “No,” Charlie said. He shook his head. He imitated the hair-pat gesture, but rubbed only fuzz and scalp. He said, and he heard the conviction in his voice as he said it, “No.”

  They ate a cold poached fish, and Ginger and Charlie drank Sancerre, while her parents drank only water. It was a lovely wine, and Charlie drank a lot of it—almost enough to make him smack his lips and comment on the generosity of a man who, unable to drink because of his health, would provide a first-class wine for those who could enjoy it. Instead, Charlie held his glass up and beamed at the wine. His father-in-law nodded and grinned. Charlie watched Ginger’s mother’s face twist during the meal. Her lips almost curled. It came and went, as the voice breaking into the rock and roll breaking into the Haydn had come and gone. For dessert they ate fresh fruit. Ginger cracked nuts for everybody. She had done this, always, as a young girl, her father pointed out. Eating none, she distributed nutmeat to all. Charlie decided suddenly that her mother was suffering physically because of thoughts that danced like electrical charges through her. Her daughter, whose presence she sought, was reminding her of what she had lost and had to lose. When they spoke of the girls away for the summer, or of Ginger’s going off to school so many years before, or of Ginger’s second, and very difficult, pregnancy, the language set the impulse off, and a mother lost her child to time, and therefore herself, and the fact shot from her memory and hummed beneath her white hair like the insects at the porch.

  There was no change of subject possible. They spoke of absent daughters, absent friends, the ailments of Presidents, and policies of nations. Ginger cracked nuts, as if she were the little child of these seventy-six-year-olds, surrounded by the house that they once had run but that now, with its demands for paint and new plumbing, its dampness in the basement, squirrels in the eaves, was running them. Around them, the grass rose to challenge their tenure, and the moths, as darkness came on, beat with big wings at the screens on the kitchen windows. Charlie watched the face of his wife’s mother as it was assaulted by what he hadn’t thought to possess any longer, much less to brandish: youth.

  Inside, television reception was very poor. The Carol Burnett rerun broke into dots and a now familiar hissing. Public Broadcasting was a purple haze that sounded like a waterfall. They went back out to the porch. Ginger’s mother reported on dead associates and distant relatives, a local sewage-tax scandal, and residential-zoning conflicts. Her father commented on Saudi Arabians who had purchased large parcels of land nearby.

  They sat for a while, and then Ginger’s mother said, “I hate this house.”

  “You love it,” her father said. “You’re angry because I forgot to open the cellar doors and windows this summer to air the damp out.”

  “I’m angry because that means I have to remember it.”

  Charlie said, “There’s always something to take care of.”

  “Unless you live in a—in one of those old places,” Ginger’s mother said.

  “No,” Charlie said. “No. I wasn’t saying that.”

  “You know how many perfectly rational, intelligent people get dumped into those places?” her mother said.

  Ginger’s father said, “Don’t worry so much. I promise. As long as I can drawl and drool and mutter, I’ll remind you that the cellar needs its airing out.”

  Her mother limped into the house and they sat in the memory of her tension. Ginger sighed. Then she said, “Oh, look at that moon!” It was full and threw a startling light, which appeared to go no distance but to burn in place. Ginger’s father called for his wife to return. “The moon,” he called. “Come look at the moon.”

  They waited, like children who had built a version of the sky, for the disgruntled elder who would come and maybe approve. She did come, with decaffeinated coffee, an offering.

  Ginger’s mother said, “What planets are those alongside it? Or are they stars?”

  Ginger said, “Isn’t one of them red? Wouldn’t that be Mars?”

  “It might be,” her mother said. “But it might be a star.”

  Ginger’s father said, “There are two more—I can’t name them. I didn’t know they clustered like that, all together.”

  “It’s probably rare,” Ginger said.

  Ginger’s mother said, “Probably very infrequent. Yes. I never heard of it before. I can’t imagine how long it might take for them to shine together again.”

  Charlie said, “It probably happens once a week.”

  Nobody laughed. The reddish star or planet was above the moon, and they could see a larger, brighter body glowing orange-white above whatever it was that shone like rust, or terra-cotta. Something else—surely it was a planet, Charlie thought, naming it Jupiter, knowing that he would think, right or wrong, of Jupiter when he thought of tonight—seemed a great white balloon.

  “Imagine,” Ginger said. Charlie knew that she would say it—how would one not?—and he regretted it for her. “Sue Ellen and Aida can see this.” Charlie squeezed at the bridge of his nose, hoping to shut off her speech. “And when we talk to them,” she said, waving at the terra-cotta planet or star, the blue-white, brilliant maybe-Jupiter, “we can say they saw—we all saw it together. What nobody might see again for who knows how long.”

  Ginger looked up to see her mother glancing down. No one needed to say who would not be on the surface of the earth to look at the sky so many years from tonight. But no one seemed capable of saying anything diversionary. So they sat for what seemed a very long while as the darkness deepened, and as the stars and planets in their slow but fugitive formation rose in the blue-black sky.

  Then Ginger’s father rumbled, deep and happy, from the chaise on which her mother sat. He was still sitting on his chair, at the other side of the porch, but his voice rolled out from a bulky cassette recorder with which her mother was fiddling. He spoke of negotiating with a Taiwan national, and of how the man had outwitted him, and his voice was cheery and possessive: he clearly knew that he was being recorded, and he seemed to enjoy letting someone preserve what only he could tell.

  “I’ve been making little tapes of some of Dad’s stories,” Ginger’s mother said. Ginger sighed a long and shaken breath. Her mother said, “Don’t worry. I won’t take down anything you say, dear.”

  Ginger said, “I don’t mind.”

  Her mother said, “When children grow up, they sound different. The most they can do is talk about what it was like when they were young. But they don’t sound the same.”

  Ginger said, “No.”

  “That was a hell of a story,” Charlie said.

  “He robbed us blind,” her father said, “because he was out-and-out smarter than I was. He did his job better. I couldn’t help admiring him.”

  Charlie nodded in the dark. Ginger’s mother played more tape-recorded sounds—Baltimore orioles calling, her own voice saying, “It’s a soft, wet night,” a neighbor saying how she had spent her day—and then Ginger’s father’s voice returned, sounding nothing so much as pleased. It was as if he knew that one day his voice would speak about the Taiwanese, or about the man who had tried to sell him a slum in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and that his tones would be charming, his story engaging, and his body long gone. He was winsome for the future, Charlie thought. He was speaking from the grave. And there he sat, before his wife, who mourned him already, and before his daughter, mostly absent these days, whose daughters were now mostly absent as well. Charlie’s eyes ached. Jupiter glowed below the moon, and Mars above, as Ginger’s mother played the cassette.

  In the darkness, Charlie could barely see any of them now. Ginger’s mother said, “I want you to hear something near the beginning of the tape. It’s sort of funny. Dad tells about the man from the aircraft company. The fellow who couldn’t tolerate dust. Did he ever tell you about that?”

  “I must have bored them with that one a dozen times.”

  Ginger’s voice said, “Tell it, Daddy.”

  Her mother said, “Let the tape tell it. Wait. I have to find it
. It’s near the beginning. Wait a minute.” She clicked buttons, reversing the tape. She pushed another button that sent it forward. She clicked and pushed, making the tape whine and jump and say fragments of sound.

  Ginger said, “Daddy, go ahead.”

  He began to talk while they sat back, invisible to one another. The hum and snick and sudden voices of the tape recorder played like a background tune in a shop while her mother searched the tape for his story. He was saying, “You see, his work involved the manufacture of instruments for fighter planes. One airplane in particular, an interceptor. They called it an all-weather interceptor. Well, you can imagine how an airplane that was supposed to fly in fog and rain might rely on its instruments. So of course the delicacy of their manufacture had to match the delicacy of the performance expected of them. Men were going to be sealed up, alone, ten miles in the air, surrounded by tons of metal alloy and wires and high explosives and kerosene, and they were going to rely exclusively on those instruments—except for their wits, of course. And who knows better than present company how little those can sometimes be counted on?”

  As if he had rehearsed, he paused for polite laughter. Perhaps if they had sat in daylight he would have expected a smile and a nod. In the background, on the tape, Charlie heard a sound that startled him. It confused him. Ginger’s father continued, “Not to mention matters of perhaps intercepting a bomber headed for the United States, or one of our military bases in Europe. So it was crucial work. He headed—this fellow I’m speaking of—he ran the team that was in charge of the final assembling of the controls display. In their lab, they wore masks and caps and gowns to keep their hair or skin off their work. They wore gloves, of course, and the lab was immaculate. One speck of dirt, as I understand it, and some gizmo might go haywire. Boom! Millions of dollars and a human life: just ashes. So he was, not surprisingly, a very nervous man. He trembled, he said, except when he was on the job. I remember saying to him, ‘You had best love your work, then.’ The poor guy. We were writing a contract proposal for the company, and he was among the technicians’ representatives in my office one morning. We were talking about wages. It was amicable, systematic, slow. This was quite a while ago. This was almost twenty years ago, my God. He sat there, shaking and pale, watching everything. He had enormous brown eyes, I remember. He was like a great big spaniel or a retriever. He watched and he watched.

  “And, all of a sudden, he sat up. He’d been slouched, looking tired, just pressing his fingers on my desk top, watching. Then he sat straight up and rubbed his fingertips together. The expression on his face was one of horror. I’m sure you can guess it. They don’t call them dusty lawyers’ offices for nothing, after all.” Ginger’s father paused. Charlie nodded and smiled, as if they sat in the light. “His fingers were covered with dust, you see. The enemy!”

  Ginger’s mother said, “There!” Her father’s taped voice in the background paused, as the voices alive on the porch did, and then the tape-recorded voice of Ginger’s father said, “The enemy!”

  “This thing takes forever to rewind,” Ginger’s mother complained. But Charlie was thinking that the sound he had heard a few moments ago, preserved in the muted chatter and mechanical grating of the buttons, was his own voice. It had spoken a syllable, now long past in the to-ing and fro-ing of the tape—a fragment of his daughter Aida’s name—and he could not avoid imagining that his daughters might listen to this same broken voice on a porch in a future night, when Ginger was absent, and he was, too, and when a rare pattern of planets would have reappeared to goggle from the dark.

  A button clicked and the tape recorder stopped. They sat in the darkness. Ginger’s mother cleared her throat. Charlie thought of his daughters thinking of him, and then, like a delicate moth settling, a hand that reached from the darkness stroked the back of Charlie’s hand. It was a tentative touch, and the hand was very light and very little—his mother-in-law’s. She offered the softest caress. Charlie waited for more. But the small hand withdrew. Ginger yawned, and her father spoke of sleep.

  NAKED

  RUDY MADE ME PROMISES, and they came true. He was our doctor and had always been. In his high, bright voice—a loud and happy shout no matter its announcement—he would cry, “You have the measles, hon!” Or: “We’re gonna take your tonsils out, you can eat all the ice cream you want!” Or: “Your head will feel better when it’s exactly twenty minutes past dinnertime!” When I was eight, I heard my mother describe him as a rascal. When I was ten or so, I knew that, according to my father, he was a presumptuous bastard. To me he was Uncle Rudy, and in the forties and fifties, he was at my bed when I was ill. If I were home from school with a flu or one of the many childhood diseases no one then was vaccinated against, I lay in my room and listened to the wood-cased radio with its golden crosshatched speaker: “Helen Trent” and “Our Gal Sunday” and, later in the afternoon, “Sky King” and “The Green Hornet.” On lucky days, I heard the Dodgers play—Jackie Robinson throwing to Gil Hodges—and, despite the music about me, and the radio voices, I always heard Rudy, or always thought I did. He drove the newest, sleekest cars, Packards, I remember, and Lincolns. Their windows rose and fell when Rudy pushed buttons. He parked with impunity in front of the fire hydrant at our curb. And, although they were tuned and silent cars, I always thought, when I heard Rudy climbing the steps, that I had heard his motor cough, or his brakes mildly squeak. I liked pretending that his process up the stairs was no surprise. And so it wasn’t one, for years and years.

  He was light on his feet, and his step was a sort of spring. His shoes had leather heels and soles, so he clacked as he climbed, and our wooden steps made groaning noises under him. I always thought it unfair that a man who could bound like that, and click as sharply as he did, still had to walk on stairs that made him sound fat. He wasn’t thin. He couldn’t have been taller than five feet seven or eight, and he surely weighed over two hundred pounds. He frequently dieted, choosing faddish and unproven methods, and once, I remember, exciting my mother to complain for his safety. Once in a while he bought new suits to flatter a slenderer shape that he would own for a couple of months. But usually Rudy seemed round: his bald head was round, and it sat atop his big chest and belly, and his thick round legs, his little feet. I heard the feet, when he came to care for me with his magic, and then I saw his round, gold-rimmed glasses on his happy pale face.

  He beamed when he saw me, and he stood above my bed and looked at me, then examined me with eyes and hands. He probed, he listened, he squeezed, and always he smiled the happiest smile. His breath smelled of chewing gum, and his voice carried total conviction. He might say, “This fever will break at—wait a minute. What time is it, Michael?”

  I’d consult the same clock that he was looking at and, with a grand sense of drama, tell him, in my weakest voice, “Two o’clock, Uncle Rudy.”

  “This fever will break at seven o’clock tomorrow morning at the latest. Do you understand? You’ll feel better by seven tonight, and by seven tomorrow morning, you’ll have a normal temperature. Which is?”

  “Ninety-eight point six,” I would recite, as if such knowledge were wisdom.

  Rudy would smile as if it were. He would nod. “Perfect!” he’d shout. “You get yourself into college, and I’ll take care of med school for you. How old are you now, Michael?”

  “Seven,” I would say, as if reaching past six had been a feat of art.

  “Well, we’ve got some time,” Rudy would say.

  And only then would he admit my mother, home from work to care for me. He always kept her outside my door because, as he often told her, he had his time alone with me, and then he had his time with her. While Rudy talked with me, my mother paced the hall. I’d hear her high-heeled shoes. And, at seven that night, I would ask for food. At seven in the morning I would register ninety-eight point six. And Rudy would have had his time alone with my mother, after his time alone with me.

  Rudy’s wife, Dorothy, had always been kind to me, and thoug
h she often came with him to our house for social evenings, I didn’t think of her in any special way. At dinner, when I was thirteen, my mother announced to us that Rudy had left Dorothy. “It’s the way all these Jewish doctors do it,” my Jewish mother said with disgust. “They marry women with money who help them pay off their debts from medical school. They buy the office equipment and pay for the nurses—and you know about the nurses, yes?—and then the doctor leaves them when they’re ugly and old.”

  My father said, “I would consider calling Dorothy ugly a massive favor to her.”

  “She can’t help what she looks like,” my mother said.

  “Maybe she can’t help it,” my father said, “but she makes Spike Jones look like Dorothy Lamour.”

  “That’s stupid,” my mother said. “All the people in the world to think about, and you pick Spike Jones? Dorothy Lamour? This is what you talk about all day in the office?”

  “All day in the office,” my father said, “we talk about numbers. We say ‘six’ and ‘eleven.’ We say ‘Ninety thousand.’ But we never say Lamour or Jones, unless it’s a client’s name. And we don’t have a client named Lamour. These are names I learned after extensive reading of the World-Telegram & Sun. I hope they aren’t too far beneath us for me to be saying them at the table. How was school, Mike?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Without question,” my father said, pulling his bow tie off and setting it beside his napkin on the table. “Absolutely. You’re excused. Do you think Spike Jones would divorce his wife just because her chin, where she needs to shave it a little, was falling down onto her neck?”

  “Huh?”

  My mother’s fork clanged on her plate.

  My father, who was usually mild if not silent, and whose square face rarely carried much expression unless he grew teary while listening to Perry Como sing songs about parting, put his lips together, puffed his smooth cheeks, and widened his eyes. He looked like a fish, and I started to laugh, although I was puzzled—frightened, really—by these meat loaf and baked potato antics. My father saw my expression and he must have understood. He said, “Just wait, Michael. Wait.” And I still don’t know if he meant me to wait for seconds or for years.