Ira had moved away, but not in concession to Bert. I knew where he’d gone. In 1950 or so, our pop, a Marine, had come home after his outfit had taken terrible losses near Pusan. He had posed for a photograph by our mother, and he had shyly smiled, but I had come, once I knew the story of his war, to not believe the pleasure that his smile suggested. I have chosen, instead, to see sorrow in his eyes. Ira kept the picture on his bureau, at least on any bureau of his that I had seen. Pop had stood in the driveway to be photographed, and Ira had gone there, to the cracked, grainy cement with its grassy stripe down the center that was mostly packed earth and some weeds. I thought of the stripe down Heschie’s hatband, and the stripe on Bert’s garters and Pop’s.
I took Ira’s arm and smelled the starch in his shirt and the sweat underneath. He put his arm around my waist. Heschie was leading Bert into my childhood house, and I wanted to be there. It occurred to me that a moment of intimacy with Bert in my girlhood room would be priceless pleasure, or maybe treason, or the combination of both that is the heart of adolescence. But I stayed where I was, held of course by more than Ira’s arm.
We stared, side by side, down the driveway toward the garage, as if we looked at someone who smiled back at us.
Ira sighed. I said, “Life biting you, Ira?”
“In the ass,” he said. “Hard. But nobody suspects.”
“How could they,” I asked, “with you so even of temper and low of key? Are you lonely?”
“Yes.”
“Sorry for yourself?”
“Of course.”
“Any chance of seeing the kids?”
“Weekends,” he said.
“Well, it’s something. And where does she live with them?”
“Lexington.”
“In Kentucky.”
“That’s the one,” Ira said.
“Will you ever see them?”
“From, as they say, time to time.” Then he asked, “Myrna, are you guys moving here?”
I pulled his arm tighter around my waist. “If he gets the job. There are a lot of men as good-looking as he is, and several women almost as good-looking, and three or four who are as smart as he is, and it’s pretty iffy. He’s scared. He doesn’t let on.”
“But if he gets the job,” Ira said.
“If he does, and if we stay together, and if I want to not work for the foundation anymore, and if I can get a job with someone here, and if I want to live with him, and if he wants to live with me. If we can survive the age difference. Then, I’d say, it’s a maybe.”
“You got so brave,” he said. “I’m at the point, now, where I get frightened from waking up frightened.”
“I’m callous and cold,” I said. “I’m selfish.”
“I wonder if Pop was scared. I think about him every day, all of a sudden. I’ve begun to, I don’t know, study him in some weird, scary fucking way. He’s like a—what’s the word?”
“Dead father,” I suggested.
BECAUSE WE HAD promised Heschie upon leaving that Mr. Bert Wragg would see where he worked, Ira took us along Eighteenth to J, then up past Ocean to Campus Road. Near where it ran into Flatbush Avenue, we looked at the pretty campus, and at adjacent Midwood, where Ira and I had gone to high school.
“Over there,” Ira said, pointing at the little building across from Midwood. I remembered lining up for first or second grade, my legs shaking with fear, outside the entrance marked GIRLS. He told Bert, “We went to grade school, P.S. 152, fully staffed by several dozen virgins over fifty plus Mr. Gottlieb with his big mustache. You had to give Heschie an autograph, right?”
Bert said, “We traded.”
“Your signature,” Ira said, “for what?”
“He took me up to Myrna’s room.”
I said, “He did?” I felt myself blush very hard as Ira started us off along Flatbush Avenue in the general direction of the river. Changing lanes, he hummed to himself. I thought of Bert in my girlhood room. It was very exciting, as I’d expected. As I hadn’t, it also felt uncomfortable, unhappy, like watching the broad, hairy back of the muscular hand of a grown-up man slide up beneath the party skirt worn by a girl of eight.
“It’s his son’s room. It smells like old socks, with maybe a trace of sperm.”
Ira said, “So it hasn’t changed, Myrna, right?”
“I loved it,” Bert said, hanging his hand over the back of the seat. I found myself reaching for a finger, and I stopped.
“How’d he know which room was mine?” I heard myself ask him.
“I told him,” Bert said.
“How in hell did you know?”
“Your stories,” he said. “I hear you, Myrna. The room near the stairs before the bathroom, right? I was listening.”
I said, “I didn’t realize I was telling.”
“As long as one of us did,” Bert said, a martyr to the gathering of news.
At Dorchester Road, humming to himself, Ira turned left, and I knew of course where we were going. A couple of blocks along, he parked, where it said No Parking, at the side of the Flatbush-Tompkins Congregational Church.
“I used to walk here every Saturday morning for Cub Scouts,” Ira told Bert, “then every Friday night for Boy Scouts. I stayed on into my first year at NYU. I loved it. They let us use the whole upstairs. We had our own basketball court.”
We followed him along the walk. Bert said, “Was he an Eagle Scout?”
“Life.”
“Sorry?”
“Life Scout. Next to Eagle, but not as good.”
“I never belonged to the Scouts.”
“You joined the young perverts, though, didn’t you?”
“I was born a pervert,” he said. “Did you ever do it inside a church?”
“Not with anyone as young as you.”
We followed the sound of Ira’s feet up two flights of gray-painted iron steps. We came to a couple of locked doors, and one that was open. It led into the tiniest gym I had ever seen—which, when I had seen it a couple of times a year for close to ten years, had seemed no smaller than Madison Square Garden, where we attended the circus.
“Mom and Pop took me here all the time to see you march and shout orders at your little fascist patrol boys in the Alligator Patrol. It used to be so big.”
Bert said, “The Alligator Patrol. It sounds like St. Paul. It’s sweet, Ira. What else is worth remembering? The church giving the room over to a bunch of kids, and all those blue-haired ladies dipped in rose water with their shelves of bosom in polka-dotted dresses having coffee and cinnamon-raisin cake and mercy mild downstairs, and there you were, marching back and forth up here. And meaning it.”
Ira wasn’t listening, though I think Bert thought he was talking to him. Ira was standing at a basket no more than nine feet high set into the wall. Like the floors, the walls were of a treated softwood that gleamed under the ceiling lights protected by metal gridwork. In a far corner that wasn’t so very far were five or six dark basketballs. I thought I could smell the electricity in the wiring, and the varnish on the wood. I remembered how on Troop Review night Pop would smile and our mother yawn, and I would inspect the older boys, Explorers they were called. They seemed closer to Pop’s age than Ira’s, whose bright eyes and hot, flushed face I still could see, whose belief I knew I believed as he clamped his mouth and raised three fingers of his hand to swear his fidelity to courtesy and thrift. And I remembered how they turned these lights off—they went out with a deep thunk—and then the boys lit up the darkness of their hall with khaki-colored Army surplus flashlights, pressing a little button to formulate dots and dashes, crying out the Morse code language in which they talked across the blackened gym about great, imagined emergencies for which, I think, Ira believed he was equipped. Dah! Di-Dit! Dah-Dah! Dit! they shouted. I took a deep breath, recalling the boys who used to march so grimly in ragged, wheeling failures of geometry, or practice tying knots they’d never need to know. Ira used to call off the names and then, clumsily, but with determi
nation, he would stand before his sweaty, earnest seven-member patrol, his back to the proud, bored families who sat on folding chairs, to illustrate the tying of the sheet bend, sheepshank, bowline, clove. The knots, tied in clothesline, hung with no function from a length of dowel stained brown to represent a tree limb, or from his hand, connecting the dark-knuckled, stumpy fingers to nothing, holding tight to make-believe logs, lead pipes, mountain climbers, or fictitious fallen victims, all accepted on faith, who would one day warrant rescue by a Boy Scout with a length of line.
“We used to play dodge ball,” Ira said.
“You throw it as hard as you can at someone on the other side,” Bert answered. He took his corduroy sportcoat off and handed it to me.
“I no longer perform dispiriting traditional gestures like holding the guy’s coat,” I said.
“I wasn’t a Boy Scout,” Bert said, looking away and letting his coat drop onto the floor at my feet, “but I was a young pervert. We played dodge ball after junior high. They had a recreational center to keep us out of trouble. It didn’t. But we did allow them to encourage us to hurt each other with basketballs.”
Bert took off his tasseled loafers and trotted out toward the basketballs. He rolled two toward Ira, and then another.
Ira called, “What are the rules?”
“There are never any rules,” Bert said.
I asked him. “What will you pretend are the rules?”
“No throwing at the head,” Ira said, throwing the ball high, missing Bert’s head mostly because Bert ducked.
“No throwing at the balls,” Bert said, missing Ira’s and hitting the wall behind him.
“It’s supposed to be you’re out if you get hit,” I said.
“But there’s only you to take somebody’s place,” Bert said, “and you can’t keep taking everybody’s place because there isn’t enough of you.”
“That,” Ira said, in Heschie’s intonations, “is the voice of all whatever.”
He threw the ball and hit Bert on the hip. Bert fired back and Ira caught the ball chest high.
Bert said, “Myrna, you keep pretending you’re replacing us both.” He fired the ball at Ira, who giggled in the shrill way boys proclaim their exuberance, and men pretend to be boys.
I left them to it, not so much out of annoyance as because I felt stupid, trying to riddle out who was attacking whom, with what surrogate weapon because of which metaphor we all were supposed to either understand or pretend to not notice. The gym smelled of sweat, probably not theirs, I realized, as I came down into the colder air of the metal stairway, past a door leading to what clearly smelled like a kitchen used a few days before, and then out to the long walk cut through moist and tender-looking lawn. Noises came down the stairs in pursuit—the slamming of leather against wooden walls, the slapping of leather on flesh. It was uncomfortably like hearing someone beaten to the accompaniment of high, psychotic giggles. I went further down the walk, then stopped, before I knew I would, to push my finger at the soft soil. As I stood up, I put it in my mouth up to the second knuckle. I tasted all I could.
Then I went to Ira’s car and leaned against the door, some woman strange to the street of high brick or wood-frame houses each behind a wall of hedge, who was wearing a skirt cut a little too short for her age, who looked like a mean bit of business. That was what Pop called me when I was undisciplined or disrespectful in mild-to-somewhat-serious ways. When I really was hard and cruel, and when he suspected me of conduct he could not bear to know about for sure, he called me no names and he listed no rebukes. He grew silent, and he tried to look thoughtful instead of confused. It was then, because I always actually did possess a conscience, I would make for my mother and beg her to interpret us to each other. And of course, since she was as dead as Pop, that was why Ira was now pursuing me.
Because I was their date, and because they were well-bred boys, Bert and Ira came quite promptly from the church where they had settled nothing. They had played a violent and harmless game, and the tails of their shirts hung out of their pants like triangular clubhouse banners. Ira’s fringes of hair were aloft, and Bert’s thick, glossy hairdo hung in front of his eyes. They stood to regard me. Bert snapped his head back, and his hair sat down in place like a well-trained, well-groomed dog. Ira pushed at his shirt, which in its whiteness, now that the sun was down, seemed to glow.
It was the fact of so much darkness, more than the glare of the lights, that made me blink. I supposed it was an automatic timer that suddenly lit the stumpy white steeple and the hemlocks that bristled at the walls. Bert raised an arm. Ira shrugged, then shook his head. They came along the walk toward me. Or maybe someone inside, I speculated, some cordial Christian host, with patience for the needful, or the faithless, or the faithful making their return, had thought to light us on our way.
I waited for the bells in the steeple to ring out the day. Ira came, winded and disheveled, to stand with me beside his car. Then Bert Wragg, Jr., joined us, flushed and smiling, perfect and at ease in our neighborhood, as he had been inside my home, my history, and me.
“Listen,” I told them, pointing up.
The man of the world and the man bereft of it looked, expectantly, while I waited for the bells in the steeple to ring. But none, in another minute, had sounded. I checked my watch and they, in response, each looked at theirs. We waited together, looking up and then at each other.
Often, of course, there are no bells.
TIMBERLINE
A MAN RIDES INTO THE NIGHT, he meets a mysterious stranger, his life is changed or it isn’t. Nobody tells him which.
For example: when he ran away from home on the eve of his forty-fifth birthday. He was at the Eleventh Street window of their apartment, trying to look through the sycamore trees, and through the nimbus-on-grit glare of the streetlight, toward Greenwich Avenue. He saw what you’d expect. He saw himself, rippling as he moved in the crazy, unclean mirror that the window made. He saw the widow’s peak, or thought he did. He saw the pale, shapeless head. But he knew it was him. His guess: he’d know him almost anywhere.
Leslie, behind him in the living room, asked, “What are you looking for?”
He said, “How’d you know I wasn’t looking at?” Then he said, “You really want to know?”
She said, “I really don’t, I suppose. I suppose we’re not going up to Madison tomorrow and pick out a print for your birthday.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll have thrown a scene.”
“I’m not throwing a scene, Leslie.”
“You’re getting ready to throw a scene, Hank. And I’ll end up crying. My face’ll look like you beat me, so you’ll be too embarrassed for us to go outside in the morning. You’ll spend all Saturday sulking because we didn’t get you anything for your birthday. Which you’ll decide by Saturday night you do want to celebrate. So we’ll go out. We’ll go to a new place and you’ll fall in love with our waitress, and I’ll get surly and we’ll hate dinner.”
He inspected them in the window glass. He looked for his former lover, stunned wordless, as he had been a number of years before, in a number of borrowed and rented rooms. All he could see of his wife and former graduate student now was her face and brushy haircut floating behind him and to the left, seeming to sit on his shoulder like a second head. He smelled her breath, which was like a spicy vermouth. He smelled her soap, which reminded him of mangos.
A summer wind he thought of as oily moved the plane tree’s smaller branches. He thought he could see, through himself and the streetlamp, the lights of a cab turning in toward them from Greenwich. He was thinking about the time he saw his father lifted by winds off the face of Mount Washington. He hadn’t known he was recalling it, nor did he know why it should come to mind now. But he couldn’t imagine, suddenly, not thinking of it all the time—how his father’s dark khaki poncho had filled with the wind that had taken him off.
That had been thirty-six years ago in Franconia, New Hampshire, on the
trail from Mizpah Springs up through the boulder fields below the harshest part of the ascent to the hut called Lakes of the Clouds. In the hut there had been an old upright piano, and simple food, and the tall, strong college boys and girls who had carried provisions in pack baskets up to the huts that were run by the Appalachian Mountain Club. The students raced up the trails, he remembered. He remembered hearing the thud of their cleated, heavy boots. He remembered smelling the sweat of a tall, blond woman who had seemed to him then to be almost as old as his father. He had been thrilled by her scent. You heard them coming up the trail, and you stepped aside, feeling lesser than they.
Now, in New York, still a bystander, he was smelling mangos and vermouth. “If you ask me what I was saying,” she said, “I’ll claim self-defense after I stab you, tonight, while you sleep.”
It was time for him to turn around and smile at her and gently take hold of her upper arms, or the back of her neck, and pull her toward him and sink, somehow, through this panic, this utter ignorance of what he ought to be doing, and get to them. He wasn’t absolutely sure, but he suspected he could always find them in her. And finding them, of course, he’d find himself.
But he kept thinking of himself, the boy at eight, in the sudden summer rainstorm on Mount Washington’s lower face, standing alone, blown against a boulder five feet high by the coiling about of the same wind that had taken his father from sight. He stood at the window, and he couldn’t turn around until her smeary face had moved from the reflection. Then he turned and looked at the room they had furnished. He walked through it to their little foyer, and he unlocked the door, and he left. He walked to Fourteenth Street, where their car was garaged.
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 33
