The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  Nora said, “What, Daddy?”

  He looked up to see Jeremy staring at Nora as Nora stared at Bing. He had separated drumstick from thigh and thigh from the carcass. He had cut off the wing. He had carved the breast meat into semicircular slices, and he stood above this orderly disposition as if he had come upon an accident, a wreck.

  “No,” he said, “I was thinking.”

  Jeremy said, “You looked sad.”

  “Sir,” he sang at the boy, “I was glad. I was glad to know you and in a transport of delight to be carving up this great big slice of bologna for your platter. That’s the matter.”

  He waited for a smile. He had hoped for laughter, but a little smile across the dull white cheeks, pushing at the dark pink bags beneath the eyes, would have satisfied him. Jeremy only watched him with his usual care, and Pop-Pop served up breast meat. Then he talked to Nora about a textbook they had to revise, for school board adoptions in Texas and Arkansas, because the sections on evolution referred to the immutable cycles of mutation. “Far be it from me to deny a biology professor his zippy little pun, his toothsome academic oxymoron,” Bing said. “But that Texas guy with the bullwhip on his office table in Congress—truly, a big black bullwhip—summoned us to Washington. I didn’t go. I refused to. But I did have to send two of the kid editors. Adoption means huge sums. Do you care about this, honey?”

  Nora’s eyes, as dark and liquid as Anna’s, looked miserable. “Like you said before,” she said, “I was thinking.”

  “About what—besides textbook adoptions?”

  “How you’re telling what somebody else ought to be hearing. But that can’t be, can it? And how I’m listening to you while I ought to be hearing a different somebody else.”

  “Somebody else,” he said.

  Nora said, “Somebodies. The case of the missing somebodies.”

  “But that can’t happen,” he said.

  “Apparently not.”

  He said, “Apparently not. But,” he said, “do I not get to gobble Jeremy’s dessert?”

  His grandson looked up expectantly, but not with resistance in his eyes, or a willingness to joke that moved on his chapped, bitten lips. He was waiting, Bing understood, to find out whether the world intended to take away his wedge of pineapple upside-down cake.

  “Oh, baby boy,” Bing said.

  Nora sat with Jeremy while Bing cleaned up dishes. He worked in a trance of hushing hot water and the simple process of scrubbing at pots and the roasting pan while the dishwasher made a grating noise behind which he sheltered the way someone is private behind a high hedge. He thought he understood everything about his loss of Anna—the complaints, the physical exam, the tests, the results, and then the roaring speed of it. He knew what he thought and felt about every grim inch of the cornering, the pinning-down, every day, into a smaller and smaller space, of the tall, tough Englishwoman he had known for so many decades. Whatever he understood about his life was through what she’d seen in him and how she had told him of what she had seen.

  But something had happened, and no one but he and Anna had witnessed it, and he thought he would never understand. It filled his chest, it pressed him breathless, to realize that he could ask only his forever-vanished wife what she had meant in the artificial dusk of their bedroom as she, on their bed, opened her eyes to find him in a chair beside her, weeping.

  He sighed, now, in Nora’s kitchen, as he recalled the discovery. Anna’s mouth had tightened, and her dark eyes had scratched like fingers at his face. He remembered straightening in the chair as if expecting a blow. And he’d received it.

  Her weak whisper spat from the yellow crepiness of her face. “Jesus, Bing,” she’d said in the darkness, “can you give me a break here. Give me a hand, old boy, and push me off.”

  So why not think of synagogues and mosques? he thought, turning his hands beneath the water. Why not wonder about churches? Besides the nighttime hauntings at home, were those not where the truths of the dead were said to reside? No one but Anna could tell him what she had wanted of him, and what it was that he couldn’t provide. She hadn’t asked him to kill her, he thought. Or had she? If he had understood that, would he have agreed? Had he tried, out of fear, not to understand? Was that the way he had let her, in her agony, down? Or was it something different, maybe even something, somehow, more?

  He had never told Nora. He wouldn’t, he knew. Jeremy knew the most, he thought, about feeling failed. His hands opened in surrender under the hot, rushing water. If he and Jeremy made it another twenty years, he thought, he might try asking his grandson the meaning of the loneliest moment of his life.

  On the way to the car with Jeremy, each of them wearing a sweater in the chill of the morning, he saw the pink, shining offal, like a tiny brain, that he had spat out before entering the house the night before. He kicked it aside, saying, “Yuck,” to Jeremy, who hadn’t noticed because, Bing suspected, he could see only the bleak patterns of the morning ahead at school. Whatever they were, they were unspeakable, and Jeremy didn’t try to describe them.

  As Bing buckled him in, Jeremy echoed, “Yuck.”

  “Yuck what, old sock?”

  “New sock,” Jeremy replied, dutifully socking his Pop-Pop’s arm.

  “Yowch!” Bing howled, but Jeremy didn’t smile. He would return tomorrow, he thought, and he would see—while he drove, or while he added fares to his Metro card at a subway station, or while he looked at proofs—the ivory cheeks, chewed lips, and anxious eyes of his child’s child. There he sat, pinioned by buckles and straps. Bing thought of last night’s roasted chicken, now a half-stripped carcass. He thought as he started the engine that its flavor filled his mouth, as if a sour bubble of grease had come up his throat to burst behind his teeth.

  “You are my hero,” he sang to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” “my lovely hero—” He said, “Did you know you were my hero?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what a hero is?”

  “No,” Jeremy said. Then he said, “Yes.”

  “What, honey?”

  “They have blue pants and boots and a red shirt,” the boy recited.

  Bing prayed: Oh, don’t.

  But Jeremy continued. “And they have a cape,” he said.

  All that Bing could say, then, was, “I love you, honey. Pop-Pop loves you to bits.”

  Jeremy whispered, “Yuck,” and then they were silent for the rest of the ride through the tidy village, and then while Bing found someplace to park, and then while he lifted his grandson out and onto the pavement, and then while they joined their hands and walked to school.

  Muriel greeted her students outside the basement entrance of the Baptist church. She wore an unbuttoned navy blue raincoat over her shoulders. He saw white tights and a short, dark skirt, and he thought—as he had so often during the evening and the long night—of the smoothness of her thighs. She smiled at them, and Bing felt himself smile back goofily, as happily as adolescent boys can smile at adolescent girls who have been kind to them. She wore a raspberry-colored silk scarf, he noticed, that was held in place with a cameo pin. He thought of it as little and brave, but he felt only pleasure—his, but also hers—in the observation.

  She said, “Good morning, Jeremy. Good morning, Pop-Pop.”

  Jeremy looked at Bing before saying, “Morning.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Bing replied.

  “Yes,” she said. She said, “I have something, Jeremy. I think you might need a new cape. This one is very powerful.” She drew a bundle from under her coat and shook it loose. A cape unfolded, a different shade of blue from her coat or skirt, but clearly part of an outfit she had planned while she planned this moment. She held it out, and Jeremy, after looking it over—Bing saw its J in white and lavender paisley—silently turned his back toward his teacher so that she could fasten its paisley ties about his neck.

  When she turned him back around and kissed his nose, he looked at Bing.

  “Looks good, old sock,�
�� Bing said.

  “New sock,” Jeremy told him and punched him with power on his offered upper arm. Bing winced and yelped, and Jeremy grinned very broadly.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Preston,” Bing insisted.

  “Thank you,” Jeremy said, moving away from them and toward a cluster of children who had been watching.

  Bing said, “That was a great—I don’t know. Courtesy. Favor. Small salvation, for goodness’ sakes. Nora asked him if she should make another one, and he said no. He cried. He was angry, I think. Because the magic of the original was gone. But there you were with this—”

  “A different magic is all,” she said.

  He knew that he had to return to his car and drive to Nora’s and then leave. But he also had to stand among the copper and the orange leaves with his grandson’s teacher. “It was generous,” he said, “and a beautiful gesture in friendship. And it was gorgeous in and of itself.”

  He felt himself reddening as she flushed up from the knot of her scarf along her cheeks and then her forehead. Her eyes were full. A father and his child were half a block away, followed by a mother who wheeled a stroller, and he sensed that they were aimed toward Muriel. Bing felt a desperation about being forced away from this final intimacy with her.

  “Gorgeous,” he repeated.

  “It’s when someone decides that the difference in the magic is acceptable,” she said. “And by the way: an action isn’t always a gesture.” She looked at the approaching father and she said, “A person needs to know the difference.”

  And he didn’t. Maybe she knew that hesitation in him. Maybe it was why she was, apparently, alone—because others also didn’t know the difference in her. He saw his grandson’s long blue cape as the boy, under its protection, dared the dangers of his peers.

  She turned from him. She turned back. “You might take some time and decide,” she suggested.

  He said, “Yes.”

  She smiled a sunny, theatrical smile. She said, “Teachers. They’re always giving homework assignments.”

  “Nora’s coming to get him after school,” Bing said. “I have to get back.”

  “Back,” she said.

  “To New York. I have a job.”

  Yes,” she said. “We never talked about our jobs very much. We were in a hurry.”

  “Yes.”

  “Too much of a hurry, do you think?”

  “Not too much of a hurry,” he said. “No. I wish—I wish we could start in a hurry all over again.”

  “We could continue in a hurry,” she said.

  “Maybe I could phone you during the week,” he said, with a thick-tongued dullness he hated.

  “Dear man,” she said, “I think you could do anything to me.” The spasm of anger he felt for the theater in her voice was frightening. He stepped back. He looked away and he waved at Jeremy, who moved his cocked arm back and forth—all he dared, in front of his friends, to display of farewell. “But you’re already gone,” she said. Her face grew serious and it seemed smaller. He thought he saw what she might look like, grown older.

  Even he, Bing thought, could hear the sorrow in his voice. “Not that far,” he said, because he wanted her to smile. “Not as far as you’d think.”

  Waving goodbye to her across perhaps ten inches as Jeremy had waved to him over a dozen yards, he turned away from the school. He prayed. He addressed no heavenly father stitched from children’s dreams. And he didn’t believe that his prayer could be heard. Still, he prayed, because now, he thought, just possibly, he understood some of what his wife might have meant in the rigors of her dying.

  Anna, he said to her as he walked through the leaves to his car, could you do me a favor, dear girl, and give me a bit of a push?

  THE BOTTOM OF THE GLASS

  THE COUSINS MADE a rough crossing, they’d have said, if they had thought to complain. They mentioned but didn’t lament the time in the air, the late arrival at de Gaulle, the bus ride to catch the train at the Gare Montparnasse, or the long wait for the Très Grand Vitesse to Bordeaux. They did joke about the man in the car rental agency at the Bordeaux terminal who spoke no English and who resented that they spoke some French. He cost them a half an hour of futile searching for the car he pretended to direct them toward, nearly shouting his exasperation: “Les voitures, il restent la, à droit—la, monsieur! La!”

  Eleanor could imagine them, with their several heavy bags, their sacks from the duty-free, their great, damp slabs and mounds of muscle and fat shifting and trembling as they panted in and about the station and, finally, through the darkness of the garage beneath it where the rentals, les voitures, were parked. She imagined Eugene’s French, with its awful accent and its wonderful vocabulary, as he breathlessly sought to entertain the traveling salesman who, speaking French with native fluency and English with a transatlantic businessman’s ease, had offered to lead them to their car.

  Now Eugene sat at the table in the kitchen of the rental house, which he called, quite properly, a gîte. They had never met, and her husband had never spoken of these enormous creatures who, it seemed, were kin. Eugene had embraced her on arriving in their sporty convertible, climbing out from behind the wheel with slow, laborious motions to hold her neck in a yoke of moist, thick fingers, kissing her head with the greatest delicacy until Bertha had pulled her away to smother Eleanor’s bowed face in those enormous breasts that shifted as if they were independent creatures trapped beneath the baggy tan traveling dress she matched with tan strap pumps and a tan leather handbag that looked as though it were weighted with stones.

  “No la, no la-di-da, and surely no parked vultures, dear girl,” the cousin of Eleanor’s dead husband chanted. “The fellow knew we’d never find them. The Sino-French gentleman, a manufacturer’s agent for plastics, if you can believe it, unless he meant explosive plastique, now that you mention it, finally showed us where to go. He’d been there before, of course, and he was waiting in the corner of the rental office with that polite tranquility of theirs—”

  “Not that my dear husband wishes to be mistaken for a racialist,” Bertha warned.

  Eugene smiled damply at the table in the kitchen they had planned, she and Sid, to use during the rest of June and all of July. While Madame Panifiette, their landlady, took the advice of her husband and several friends in the area to consider whether—here she had made a number of faces involving downturned lips, raised brows, and a half a shake of the head—given the legalities involved, she could release Eleanor from the remainder, as she said it, of “your obligation to me.”

  Eleanor had said to the tiny Madame Panifiette, with her alabaster complexion, in front of Eugene and Bertha, “You never liked me, did you?”

  “Well, now,” Bertha had said, in sweet, slippery syllables, “we don’t want to necessarily accuse anyone of anything, do we?”

  Between them, Bertha and Eugene weighed seven hundred and fifty pounds, Eleanor would have bet. On a better day, she’d have guessed it at six-fifty. But this was only a few days after Sid had looked up from the little corner table on which he leaned toward his white, lined pad with his fine-point fountain pen. She had been sitting at the pine dining table in the tile-paneled kitchen, writing postcards home at maybe eight in the morning. She looked up as Sid did. They caught each other’s eyes. She thought he was going to say something rueful about his work. She was ready to smile and cluck and go back to the cards that told what a fine time they were enjoying. But it stopped, inside his eyes, and they went out. He fell sideways from his chair. She went to him, she called to him, she blew her breath past his teeth and felt it going nowhere except back up at her mouth. That night, after following the ambulance to the regional hospital and after talking to a man from the gendarmerie who seemed too young to drive, much less take charge of her husband’s death, she used Sid’s address book and her own to call home and speak to eight or nine people. She did not call her daughter, Margo, and every day that she failed to, it seemed like a more impossible task. It was an overdue
account, accruing a terrible interest. Of the people she did call, Sid’s cousins, whom she’d never met, insisted that they come to her. They flew from Baltimore to Roissy–Charles de Gaulle, they took the train to Bordeaux, and they navigated their rental car over the small roads of the wine country of southwestern France, and here they were, managing, among other elements, her grief. Over some days, the details of their journey emerged, and she came to think of them as her big, fat heroes.

  They were probably sixty, she thought. Bertha was as tall as Eugene, with beefy shoulders and thick, rounded arms. She dyed her hair black as if to match it to the hair of her shaved moustache. She wore either dresses or skirts with matching tops, nothing tucked in, which was a vanity that Eleanor found moving. She could see the breadth of Bertha’s vast thighs as she walked briskly, in dressy high heels, through the echoing, cool, white or white-and-rose tiles of the floors and walls of the gîte. She “straightened things up,” she said. “Not that it isn’t as neat as a pin. But one tries,” she said, “to help. The best, the most useful help, they say, is order. So one picks up.”

  Eugene, who ran a rare-books business in Baltimore, on one of the streets near the revived waterfront area, looked every day at the few French books Madame Panifiette had supplied, as well as the couple of stacks that had taken up too much of the space in Sam’s and Eleanor’s rolling duffel cases. When he wasn’t reading in books he clearly didn’t like, or looking at titles he didn’t want to open, Eugene spoke on the telephone, using his credit card, to arrange in his blatting but quite correct French for the passage home of three vertical Americans and one who would, as soon as his body was released by the authorities, travel prone.