The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  So we ought to have known, right?

  I had asked this of the doctor, and he’d said, “No, ma’am. No. Forget any words like ‘should’ and ‘ought.’ I have astonishing news for you. I want you to memorize what I say. You did not cause this disease and—you ready?—you can’t cure it. Didn’t cause, can’t cure. Hug her when she lets you, and don’t get mad at her. It isn’t her fault, either. Well, you will get mad, but try and not show it.”

  I said, “But how can you have a problem and it isn’t someone’s fault.”

  He laughed. “I’m Jewish, too,” he said, “but you can get used to it. No-fault disease.”

  I MADE COFFEE in the early morning, put the photo albums away, found my stomach too upset for coffee, and went upstairs to wake Alec for the drive to Cooperstown. She sat on her bed, her back against the wall, the covers wrapped around her as if she had just been rescued from a wreck at sea. Her face looked almost yellow, and the shadows under her eyes looked brown. She hadn’t slept a lot of the night. She had wakened and, sitting before the mirror on her dressing table, she had cut off her hair. It lay on the floor around her chair. She had given herself a crew cut.

  “Interesting hair,” I said.

  “Hair today,” she answered, “gone tomorrow. It’s tomorrow.”

  “We need to leave as soon as you shower,” I said.

  “I’m not going.” Her eyes were dark with anger. Looking into them was like looking into the upstairs window of a high, old house. Someone, you suddenly realize with fright, is looking out of the window at you, and their expression has to do with disgust and with mockery.

  I tried to say it to myself: I didn’t ... I can’t ... But I forgot the doctor’s words.

  “Sure, Alec. Yes. Absolutely. We have to go.”

  “Why do we have to go?”

  “So you can get better.”

  “Better,” she said.

  “It’s your life, Al. You need to do this.”

  “Need,” she said.

  “Al.” I remembered his injunction against anger. I thought: Hey, you use your tranquility when it’s your kid. “Goddamn it, Alec. This is for your health.”

  She said, as I knew she would, “Health.”

  Then I realized what I had seen. I went to her dressing table and got down on my hands and knees. Coriander lay among the long, looped shafts and shorter curls of hair, and she lay down there in two pieces. Using her shears, Alec had severed the stuffed head from its stuffed body.

  I squatted there, then turned to face her. The terrible face appeared in the window and looked down the length of the room to me.

  “Oh, Alec,” I said.

  She said, “Oh, Mommy. It’s only a household pet.”

  The doctor had given me one more set of instructions, and I remembered them quite well.

  I said, “I’m going to call the state police. They’ll force you to the hospital, Alec. It’ll, I don’t know, go on your record. You’ll be a lawyer with a note on your record: ‘State Police,’ it’ll say.”

  “They can’t,” she said, “and don’t pretend they can. You think you can put the whammy over on a law student? And what record, you Jew-mother jerk.”

  “I’m going to tell them I feel threatened. They’ll do it.”

  “Threatened,” she said. “Only if you’re a household pet,” she said, “or if you’re named Petrekis.”

  “What about him?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Alec, did you do something to Petrekis?”

  “Who?”

  “To punish him?”

  “For hit-and-run foreplay? It is a punishable offense. For hit-and-run soixante-neuf compounded by simply yet absolutely Not. Being. A. Stand. Up. Guy.”

  “Alec, what? What happened?”

  “When?”

  “Okay. I’m calling the police. Have a happy morning.” I went to the foot of the stairs and found the number in the phone book and dialed it. My hand was shaking, and my voice, when I spoke to a woman who called herself sergeant something, wobbled and wavered. I said, “I’m calling from outside of ... no, it’s really in the township ... Hell. I’m a little nervous. Sorry.” Take a breath, ma’am, take your time, are you all right, etc. And I was saying, “My daughter has had what I guess you’d call a nervous breakdown. I need to ...”

  Alec walked downstairs, wearing flannel pajama bottoms, a dirty white T-shirt, and slippers without socks. She shook a blanket out like a cape and wrapped it around her shoulders. She went around the corner into the living room, and I heard noises but closed my eyes and took a breath so I could tell the sergeant what I needed.

  Alec reappeared. She was red-faced, and I was grateful for any relief of her pallor, even though she was the color of her anger at me.

  “Whore,” she said. “Candy-assed Jew whore and your pimp doctor cop friends.”

  She walked past me and out the back door.

  “A second,” I said to the sergeant.

  I heard my car door slam.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, swallowing against what I think would have been sobs. “I think it might be all right. I’ll call you back if there’s a problem. Thank you. I’m very sorry for this.”

  I didn’t and I can’t.

  I took a jacket and keys and my wallet and went outside to drive her to the hospital. That was where they finally came, a couple of days later, when I was in the visitor’s lounge, taking a break from Alec’s complaints and her anger at what she called my betrayal. It was a new word to hear from Alec about myself, and I was chewing on it, really tasting its possibilities for me. A man in a wrinkled gray uniform was directed to me in the washed-out light of the beige waiting room, and he presented me with what he called a bench warrant—I had never heard the words—for Alec’s arrest, sworn out by a magistrate in Manhattan because she had fled the county to avoid prosecution for stabbing Victor Petrekis in the face.

  The information about the face came from the sheriff’s deputy who served the warrant. The warrant used the following words: “felonious” and “assault.” Neither it nor the deputy conveyed the information that the weapon was the small stainless pocket knife imported by the assailant’s father and given to her so she could be, for a little while, one of the fellows. The deputy left, and then I left. I needed to talk to lawyers, and Alec did not need to deal with one more fact served up by the world.

  At home, I spent about an hour making chicken salad for a sandwich. I had no bread in the house, so I spent a while longer defrosting some rolls, then slicing and toasting one. I made myself a big sandwich with lots of lettuce, and I carried it into the living room. I wanted to sit with a book and find some language that would do me some good. I drifted along the shelves looking at titles, soon enough coming to the conclusion that I hadn’t the energy to read a paragraph of anyone’s book. I looked at a stack of CDs. I didn’t want music either. I wanted silence, sleep, and somebody, when I woke up, who would manage the claims for health insurance, the bills from the landlord in New York, the conversation with the lawyer I would have to hire to represent Alec in court.

  I realized that I was staring not at dust jackets but at the objects in front of them: the bride and groom, who had more or less outlasted Barry and me, despite the nick I’d left on the head of the groom, and who had served to demonstrate, Barry liked to say, how dangerous my appetites had always been. When he spoke about sex, he would leer, I told him, like a peasant in the countryside. And he was pleased to serve as the local life force.

  I said, “Barry!”

  Their heads were off. She had battered them against the edge of the shelf. Fragments lay there and on the floor, and it came to me then: the poem they recite at you during graduations and the presentation of trophies to injured athletes. It was about how if you could keep your head while all about you were losing theirs and blaming it on you, you’d own the world.

  I saw that each figure had a metal rod around which it was molded, so the little couple would probably not cru
mble further, and would stand, adhering to their little skeletons, for as long as I left them on the shelf. I chewed at my chicken salad sandwich, looking back into their faceless stare.

  I let myself pretend that Barry would walk into the living room then and ask me what I was doing.

  I let myself pretend I would answer.

  “Owning the world,” I would say around a mouthful of sandwich.

  BOB’S YOUR UNCLE

  I LOVED HIS MOTHER ONCE. One time, that is, in my marriage to Jillie, I loved this boy’s mother, made love to her, once, with gritted teeth, and a wet mouth, and wide eyes. When he came to our house, where his parents years before had brought him to visit with Jillie and me, I thought he carried word of his mother’s death. He blinked in my doorway, he smiled with embarrassment as I did. And I started mourning Deborah. And then I was relieved. And then, of course, I grew so guilty about the sorrow and about my almost physical sense of release—freedom from the dream of her, and freedom from the secret—that I was speechless and blushing, a little breathless, while I watched his taxi back down our drive and turn toward Rhinebeck. I nodded to prompt his next words. He nodded back. I felt a tentative relief and I smiled. He smiled in return. I shrugged and held my arms out. He shrugged and we embraced.

  Finally, I called, “Kevin Slater’s here!”

  Kevin nodded his agreement. He carried an expensive leather overnight bag on a shoulder strap, and he wore an unconstructed sportcoat of light brown linen over olive chinos. His shirt was thick, creamy cotton with olive stripes, and his loafers, over bare feet, were of a soft, tan weave. His face had grown long and lean and muscular, but he still, with his peaked eyebrows and big, brown eyes, his tan complexion and his smile you would only call wicked, looked like a boy.

  Kevin said, “Hi, Uncle Bob. Hi, Aunt Gillian.”

  Jillie, arriving behind me, said or sang a long “Oh,” and then she shouldered past me to seize Kevin and hug him.

  He smiled over her shoulder at me, and I saw in his grin and in his young man’s face what I saw, and had told myself I wasn’t seeing, when he was a boy: a kind of menace that you call, that I had called, naughty or wicked, but that was maybe threatening—was maybe a sign of something even dangerous. The way certain autistic children can seem ordinary and then, on study, not quite, Kevin seemed in reverse—extraordinary, but then, perhaps, not quite. Maybe he was simply a tall, muscular, café-au-lait kid with wicked, call them naughty, eyebrows.

  “How’s your mother?” I said. “Your folks.”

  “London still. Dad’s a big shot. They send for him in limousines. American limousines, the long ones.”

  Jillie said, “Your mother’s all right?”

  He shook his head as Jillie released him. His face grew slack and sad. “Mom has a boyfriend. He’s a chemist at Glaxo. She says no, but Dad says yes.”

  I felt as if I’d sucked on a lemon, and as I spoke the pain remained, inside my head, beneath the ears, at the mastoid. “What’s your opinion, Kevin?”

  “She says no,” he answered. “But some nights she doesn’t come home and Dad makes breakfast for us.”

  “You’re only as old as you think,” Jillie said. Then: “Darling Kevin, come inside and stay for a while. That’s why you’re here, I think. To stay with us?”

  “Could I? I got no place to go, I’m pretty sure. I went to my friend’s house in New York, but he moved. I don’t know a lot of people, Aunt Gillian.” His face wrinkled in horizontal folds, and I thought he was going to cry. She hugged his arm to her, and I watched as he moved it a little to better brush her breast. She tugged him along. When he passed me, as I stood back to hold the door, I smelled again his funk of airplane travel—unwashed skin, stale air, exhaustion—and I saw that his swell shirt was dirty, as though he had worn it for a week. Grit was crushed in the nubbing of his sportcoat, and his trousers had dark spills of sauce imprinted down the front. I had sat him on my lap to drive the lawn tractor. I had held him on the dock at our pond. And here he was, wily and odd-looking, very large and a little arrested-sounding, and coated with the grime of the world.

  When he was four, I remember, they had started visiting doctors and had begun to send him to private schools. Teachers called him difficult, one even called him frightening, and that sent his mother to pediatric psychologists and Kevin to more expensive schools. They had tried for six years—of taking Deborah’s temperature, of consulting fertility cycle charts, of pumping Arthur into test tubes—and then they had adopted Kevin, a beautiful baby whose birth mother was Honduran, and Kevin had become the warning bird in Deborah’s life. She was like a miner in a coal seam who watched the canary—a bird’s health meant good air, a bird going sick meant misfortune. Deborah, always extraordinary, with her pale, oval face and her sad eyes, long pianist’s fingers, ebony hair, became brilliant with Kevin. He was the dream of her life she had dreamed. When he was well, she shone like his moon. When he was becoming what the schools called difficult, her hair went matte, and her eyes floated over deep brown, sorrowful semicircles. Arthur, who was erect as a soldier and who never wanted children, he claimed, was a father dutiful not to the baby, but to his wife. In serving Kevin, he served her, and I thought it likely she had never forgiven that disloyalty to Kevin. He was a sales manager of switches and machine parts for all of western Europe on behalf of a British firm that also owned paper mills and bakeries. He’d grown rich and Deborah distant, at least from us, and their child with Indian and Spanish blood was here, as out of focus—no: as hard to find a focus for—as an ill-composed snapshot.

  Jillie said, “Kevin, how long can you stay?”

  From a distance he was a male model, and up close he was a soiled boy edging toward man. His confused, confusing smile flared, and he said, “Whatever you say, Aunt Gillian.”

  “I say you stay as long as you feel like.”

  He clenched a fist and showed it to me, as if we had both been striving for admission. I nodded back and I guess it was a smile I showed him in return. Jillie took him upstairs and I went, as if casually, to the bookshelves in the living room. I found the book, a collection of poems by Alan Dugan that his mother had given me. There was a poem in it that began, “The curtains belly in the waking room.” Deborah had brought it to me, along with a wonderful antique book of flower prints for Jillie, and a bottle of Château Palmer that Arthur analyzed before he let us taste it. They were house gifts she bore, except that I knew which room the curtains had bellied in, and who had wakened with whom, and so did Deborah, and we were the only ones.

  Kevin slept off his jet lag, and Jillie and I cast speculations that sank like stones in the sea.

  “He might just be a little dopey from travel,” she said.

  “You know what weariness is, and you know it’s something else.”

  “It couldn’t be easy to march into somebody’s house after, Jesus, eleven or twelve years, it must be. And say, ‘Hello, my mother’s sleeping around and my father’s too busy, and I’m a little screwed up.’”

  “No,” I said, “except he didn’t say or intimate or even hint sleeping around, Jillie.”

  “She always fancied your ass.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Didn’t she.”

  “Jillie.”

  “And you were not, let’s say, unalert to that exquisite face or the body that went along with it. Could we say unalert?”

  “It isn’t even a word, much less a smart idea. No.”

  “No,” she said.

  “That is correct.”

  “No is correct.”

  “I said so.”

  “And so you did. Except I think she did fancy you, as they say.”

  “Nobody says fancy you and nobody says unalert.”

  We were behind the house, in a field that curved like a cheek, and we were walking slowly in the bright six o’clock light of a late-spring sunset. Jillie wore her New York Knicks baseball hat over a new haircut that was so short, she said, the breezes made her cold. Sh
e wore the hat, I thought, in mourning for the Knicks, who had once again failed to make progress in the playoffs. I took her hat off and ran my hand through her hair. She held my wrist and pulled my hand down onto her head.

  “You are a bit of a frog and a fogey,” she said, “but I am not unalert to your cute little paunch and your much-fancied ass.”

  “You don’t know any words,” I said. “Paunch is out these days.”

  She looked at my midsection. “Out and over the belt, just about. But we can say belly if you like.”

  As in what a curtain will do in a bedroom window in the cool air of morning, if you like.

  EARLY SUNDAY, KEVIN was up by the time I returned from Rhinebeck with newspapers and German coffee cake. I could smell the shampoo and soap, but I could smell his clothing—he was wearing what he’d worn the day before—and, for all his scent of soap, there were bands of dirt beneath his nails, and his knuckles seemed dyed a darker brown than his broad hands. Jillie was in her jeans and one of my flannel shirts and she wasn’t wearing a brassiere, which I learned by following Kevin’s eyes as she walked across the kitchen with coffee and plates for the cake.

  “Kevin,” I said, “are you all through with school?”

  “I’m done with school, Uncle Bob.”

  “Did you go to prep school?”

  “I went to the American school.”

  “And you graduated?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you out on your own?”

  “Whenever I want.”

  “No, I mean are you living on your own. In an apartment, with a job and a life and all of that.”

  “Jobs are hard,” Kevin said.

  Jillie said, “Is there anything in the sports about the Knicks making a deal? So they can silence their critics? Bob?”