The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  My mother hardly waited seconds. She pushed the yellow Fiesta Ware pitcher so hard that water spilled from it onto a yellow, chunky Fiesta Ware plate. I thought again of our door. “You know how old he is? Rudy?”

  My father answered her by smiling and nodding his head. He didn’t make the fish face, and I was grateful. I told my mother, “No.”

  “This doesn’t concern you,” she said, her pretty face white, her thick lip reddening under her teeth while she waited an instant, and then said, “Forty-four.”

  My father smiled broadly, then he reddened. Then he leaned back in his chair and smiled at something on the ceiling. I looked up, saw nothing, then looked down at my brown, grainy meat loaf. I waited for more. There was silence, and then my father’s voice: “I know it.”

  “You know his age. Yes. But hers? Do you know hers?”

  “Oh,” my father said, as if he mugged for an audience. “You mean there’s another woman? Well. I must say, I don’t know how old she is. I’ll bet, though, whatever her age is, it wouldn’t take too many numbers to write it or say it. And I bet you’re crazy with it.”

  “I’m not crazy with it!”

  “Michael, is she crazy with it, or what?”

  “Don’t you do that to him.”

  “You do it to him and it’s all right. He sits here and you get crazy and it’s right. I ask him about it and I’m wrong? What is this conversation about?”

  Now, I was old enough to know that something more than minor was going on. I was also young enough to be tempted, for an instant, to cry out loud—for Rudy, or for everything my parents seemed to threaten to leave behind, or for what I couldn’t discern in the murky innuendo of their talk. But I was old enough to succumb to none of those temptations. I took a breath, I bent to my plate, and I ate the meat loaf, pulpy as usual (my mother never thought we’d have enough) with too much torn-up bread.

  My mother said, “The woman is twenty-four. Rudy is forty-four. She is twenty years younger than he is. She—”

  “No,” my father said. “No. You deprived me of the pleasure of announcing the fullness of this catastrophe. You really owe it to me to allow me to finish the cliché. Now, if I remember it—wait. Yes. Okay. I think I have it now. She is old enough to be his daughter. Right?”

  “No. Young enough,” I said.

  My father’s breath hissed. My mother said, “Michael.”

  So I said, “Excuse me,” with what I thought of as dignity.

  In my room, among my books and flung-about clothing and the drawings of spaceships and space suits and other apparatus of a future I saw as free of gravity and full of colorful wars, I lay on my bed and looked over the lights of our neighborhood in Brooklyn, and tried to make sense of my parents’ life together, and mine with them, and ours with Rudy. It was spring, the limbs of giant high trees were whipped by winds that came up, then died, with no preamble. At one moment, the skies were quiet; at another, they softly roared. The dark blue air looked grainy, and moving branches with their new leaves sliced the light from houses on the block behind us and made the brightening moon seem to dance in its place, low above the neighborhood. After a while, I did some homework and didn’t think of Rudy or my parents until I heard their footsteps as they climbed the stairs.

  “There are dishes to be dried,” my mother said at my closed door. “Most children your age have to wash them too.”

  “You all right?” my father called.

  “It’s all right to come in,” I said.

  I waited, but I heard their bedroom door close, and I knew that the fight—about what?—was moving to private quarters. When they’d come up the stairs together, the house had seemed to shake. I had looked from my window as they climbed, to see whether the moon seemed to vibrate more than before. The winds had slackened, the moon had looked still, and I remember that I’d smiled with gratitude. My contentment stayed with me that night, and it came down to breakfast with me in the morning; I was prepared to let their mystery be theirs. Rudy was coming to dinner that weekend with his fiancée, as my mother called her, and I would wait until then for further clues.

  My father seemed apprehensive on Saturday, though as usual he worked in the garden, wearing his World War II fatigues. He’d begun to talk about how few men his age could still get into their army-issue clothes. Pausing often to catch his breath, he clipped what rarely needed cutting back, he painted a portion of the high fence that screened us from our neighbors, he mulched and raked and swept; he made time away in a place that was away, and he thought to himself about matters of which he never spoke to me. Or so I concluded. His face, when he worked, was someone else’s, and I often watched him with curiosity. I never worked beside him, though: I was the usual thirteen. He was showered and dressed quite early, and he was early at his inventory of liquors and mixers and pickled onions and candied fruits and ice. I wore clean corduroys and a shirt with a starched collar that irritated my neck. I was watching wrestling on television while my father made the living room ready for peanuts and drinks, and while my mother slowly dressed.

  I saw my father look at the ceiling only once—I was reminded of his upward glance during their argument—and I don’t know if he was thinking of my mother upstairs. But I was. For I was listening, over the cries of the fans of Bruno Sammartino, to her feet. She was already in her high-heeled shoes, and I listened to their slow, lassitudinous rhythm as she drifted from her bureau to her closet mirror, then back to her bureau drawers again. Her footsteps at first seemed almost random. She surely didn’t dance on her bedroom’s parquet floor. But something under the percussion of her heels did suggest to me a kind of dance—she moved from here to here, from here, then, to there, and purpose changed her position, though nothing like a plan. Bruno, fighting clean while his lighter longer-haired opponent used illegal blows and outlawed holds, persevered, then triumphed. He used his famous flying dropkick, and he won. I watched the referee count the opponent out. As the canvas slammed with the final count, and as Bruno sprang to his bare feet, I understood: I had heard my mother thinking. The sharp and aimless-seeming sounds of her staccato shoes had been, in fact, an accompaniment kept by her body for the thoughts—and hadn’t they been stabbing thoughts—that were sounding inside as she picked out earrings or brushed at her glossy brown hair. All at once, my mother’s footsteps upstairs grew purposeful. She marched across the floor. On our groaning stairs, she came down.

  My father, as if signaled, went to the hall closet for his sportcoat. He turned to my mother and said, “You look nice.”

  “I look fantastic,” my mother said.

  I stayed with a tag-team wrestling match and didn’t look up for a while. But they’d both looked pretty good to me, and awfully nervous, and I hoped, suddenly, that I wouldn’t hear Rudy’s car at the curb, and that he wouldn’t come. It was the first time I had not wanted to see him. It was the first time I’d considered whether to want to see him or not. I was enough of a child to think of grown-ups—and surely of Uncle Rudy—as climate, neighborhood, a feature of my life, and not what I voted on. My own will made me itch.

  And I did hear the faintest protest of brakes, I thought. And I surely heard feet that shuffled against the broad brick steps outside, and that thumped on the wooden floor of the porch, and that shushed on the mat before our door as the doorbell rang. My father answered the door, and his voice was full of bonhomie. My mother joined him—the sound of her feet across the foyer reminded me of black men who tap-danced on Ed Sullivan’s show—and she was cordial, though grave. I turned the set off and went to be a cute nearly-nephew to Uncle Rudy and the woman my mother had known in advance she would hate.

  I hugged Rudy; I usually did. He looked at me and, as usual, he beamed. “You look like a million bucks, fella!” he said, so clearly glad to see me that I almost hugged him again. I did put my hands on his shoulders and squeeze, and he said, “By Jesus, I love ya!” I noticed three things as he spoke—the heat of my reddening face as my field of vision include
d the woman with Rudy; my mother’s teeth on her lip; the new woman’s height and stunning beauty. “Meet Genevieve! Michael, this is Genevieve. I completely love her. I wanted you to meet her because I wanted the two of you to love each other. Isn’t this great?”

  Genevieve was taller than Rudy, taller than my mother and me. She and my mother shook hands gingerly, I noticed. My father actually took Genevieve’s hand and raised it to his lips. My mother bit hers. Rudy smiled and smiled, and he pounded my father’s shoulder and rubbed the back of my head and told us all how grand things were. Genevieve stood without moving, as if she were a mannequin. Her hair was the blackest I have ever seen. Her skin was so pale, it looked like the waxy yellow-white of an antique doll’s. Her eyes were very large and dark in an oval face that was slightly rounded at the cheekbones, but slender nevertheless. Her figure, slim according to the standards of Hollywood in the fifties, still required my attention, and her suit, made of something white and fine, struck me as unusual. When we sat in the living room, I stared at her legs, which were very long and slender and on which she wore smoke-colored stockings. I had never seen hose like that except in magazines purchased by the fathers of my friends. I looked at her every time I thought I could study her without getting caught. She sat on our yellow sofa next to Rudy, and she said little. He touched her often, and I watched his beefy hands. When she spoke, Genevieve talked about European cities, and music I hadn’t heard of. Rudy often spoke of her as though she weren’t there. Looking at my mother, his old friend, he would reach out and tap my mother’s knee, then say, “Isn’t she a dreamboat? She’s my dreamboat. I treated her for a sore throat! Imagine! I looked down her throat, and I wanted to climb in after the tongue depressor!”

  “Rudy, you’re disgusting,” my mother said.

  “But you’re honest, Rudy, aren’t you,” my father said as he mixed more drinks. “You’re an honest man.”

  I remember Rudy as a brilliant man. He seemed that way that night, in spite of his playing what I would later think of as the middle-aged fool. Light came off his glasses as he sat up higher on the sofa. His eyes grew wider, and I watched as he saw what was invisible to me. My mother was saying something patronizing to Genevieve, who nodded but didn’t reply. Rudy said to my father, “You have the sound of a man with something to say.”

  “Oh, no,” my father said, opening a bottle of club soda. “No, I’m a CPA. I just work with numbers. You know. My work involves nothing more than what adds up.”

  Rudy said, “As in two plus two equals four, and no latitude for interpretation?”

  My father passed a tall iced drink. “Twos are twos,” he said. “Fours are fours. That’s it. Yes. And I’ve worked with those numbers.”

  Rudy said, “And for some time?”

  “Yes, for some time.”

  Rudy said, “I wonder if I know what you mean.”

  “Oh, sure,” my father said. “Yes. You do.”

  Rudy raised his glass and looked at my father with a smile of, I think, admiration. “Here’s to your guts,” Rudy said. He drank, then raised his glass again. “Salud. And here’s to your perspicacity.” He drank again, then turned to Genevieve. “Hon? You know what that means? Perspicacity?”

  My father sipped his drink, then quietly left the room. My mother watched him. She said, in a voice that imitated the sounds we make when we jest, “Are you two fighting again?”

  “We never fight,” Rudy said, smiling. “Sometimes we disagree, but then we only argue, and just for fun. The way that old friends do.” He paused, then picked up his glass. “Sweetheart,” he said to my mother, “here’s to old friends.”

  My mother raised her glass, but didn’t drink. She looked at Rudy, and kept on looking. Genevieve raised her eyebrows in her otherwise immobile face. My father, returning, said, “Sorry.”

  Rudy drank some more and said, “Let’s not be sorry.”

  My mother put her glass down and said, “I have to cook. Michael, tell them about school. What happened yesterday. You remember. I have to go cook.” She still looked at Rudy, but he had turned toward me, so she stood and left the room with loud, quick steps.

  I had always performed at my parents’ evenings, and with Rudy I never had minded. But it was Genevieve, leg and thigh, breast and throat, arched thin eyebrows, long white hands, at whom I looked as I told how a fellow named Green, several years older and a foot taller and a lifetime more dangerous than the other boys in our junior high school, had been plucked from Industrial Arts by two policemen. “He shot a kid,” I said. “He shot a kid in the eye with a zip gun he made. A pipe thing, lead pipe, with a bullet in it. You use a really heavy rubber band with a nail, that’s the firing pin—it explodes the bullet,” I explained to Genevieve. “You put a wooden handle on it with tape. He shot this kid and they had to take out his eye. The kid didn’t die, though.”

  Genevieve asked, “What kind of school do you go to?”

  “Public school,” I said, assuming that creatures such as she went only to private schools in major European capitals. “Andries Hudde Junior High School,” I said, hating its provincialism. “It’s on Nostrand Avenue.” I was searching for ways to make myself die, which seemed the only appropriate response to having sat before this exotic person to speak to her of Ralphie Green and his zip gun, and a school named Hudde.

  “I never heard of that school,” she said.

  “Oh,” I answered, “that’s all right.” And, blushing sweatily, smiling goofily at Genevieve, at whom Rudy goofily smiled, I finally said, “Will you excuse me please? I have to go help? I’ll be right back.” I fled.

  And in the kitchen, which was around a corner and down a short corridor from the living room, in a litter of black pans and wet potholders and a smoking leg of lamb, I found my parents in a sad and knotted embrace. My father was saying, “No, no. It’s all right. It’s all right. No.”

  “I don’t have any right to be comforted,” my mother said.

  “Sure,” my father said. “Everyone does.” But he moved back from her a little.

  “By you?”

  “By me,” he said. “Why not? Who else?”

  “I don’t really hate her. She’s so young, though! I don’t mean that. I don’t know if it has anything to do with her. Does it?”

  “I’m a CPA,” my father said. “I know about numbers. Look how long I didn’t know about you. Don’t ask me that kind of a question.”

  “What do you know about me now?”

  “Not a lot.”

  “When?”

  He said, “What?”

  “You know. When did you know?”

  “I’m not talking about it,” my father said, drawing farther away. “Not when or where, not how many times. None of it. I didn’t talk about it before, and I’m not talking about it now. Let him get married to his dream girl and that’s that. No more. And pay attention to tonight. The man is moving on. He doesn’t want the old parts of his life anymore. He wants a divorce.”

  “I don’t. I mean, from you.”

  “You should have,” my father said, stepping farther back. “A long time ago. It isn’t shameful. Everyone wants a divorce.”

  “You?”

  “Everyone,” he said. Then he said, “But what in hell do I know?”

  I went upstairs, waving at Rudy and Genevieve as I passed the living room, smiling some sort of smile. I shut my door and walked about my room, touching objects. I heard my name in living room murmurs, and then I heard feet on the stairs. They cracked and creaked, groaning their old-wood noises. It was Rudy. He didn’t knock, as my parents would have. They were enlightened parents who read the columns by psychologists in the old New York Post. Rudy just walked in, because he was welcome, he assumed, and because he loved me. As far as Rudy’s reasoning went, I think, love gave you permission to do anything to anyone. What he did was save my life and keep my health. And make love to my mother. First he had his time with me, and then he had his time with her. I cannot remember him leaving a lot
. But I remember him entering—through the front door, up the steps, or into the kitchen or living room, or swinging open the door to my room. He was always on his way in. So no wonder, then, that my mother could not imagine his departure. And his tall, pale Genevieve, so different in size, coloring, ripeness from my mother—she was Rudy’s signal good-bye. Although he did love us all, I think, and even my father; and he surely wanted to share his happy news.

  But he was leaving as he entered. I could tell. I started to cry. Rudy, with his sweet breath and giant chest, leaned against me and hugged me with his short, strong arms. He pulled and pulled.

  “Did you ever think you were adopted, hon?”

  I remember feeling my body grow cold. I couldn’t bear any more news, I thought. I was always very careful about how much stress I accepted. I shook my head.

  “Well, you aren’t. But I always thought you were more like me than him. That’s not fair to say, is it? But I thought so. I wished. I totally love ya! Remember that. Remember me. I knew your parents when we were all skinny intellectuals in the Communist Party. Did you know that? We ate lousy food and drank lousy wine and told each other lousy lies about lousy goddamned liars in Moscow. Did you know that?”

  I stayed against his chest. I shook my head.

  “And we were so goddamned happy! And your father and I loved your mother, and then your father won. He’s—sneaky. Because he’s so tough. So watch your ass with him. He’s tough! When you see those lousy movies where the movie’s always on the side of the guy who’s taking the pretty girl away from the boring accountant—well, whatever. Don’t believe it! The accountants always win! And I love ya! I’m happy as hell you could meet Genevieve. Don’t you love her? Don’t you love her?”