The Stories of Richard Bausch (17 page)

He’s silent again.

“That’s all you saw in me.”

“Oh, please,” he says.

Abruptly she stands. “Excuse me. I’ll wait out in the car.”

“Marlee—” he says. But she walks away from him, forges past the waiter, and heads down the long hallway with the pictures of dead presidents of the United States. The brandy she’s drunk causes her to stumble into a chair, and her gait is very unsteady, but she keeps on, feeling the need to hurry. When she reaches the end of the hallway she turns and sees that the waiter is standing in the door, from where she has just come, wiping his pale hands on a white towel. He stares coldly at her, then faces the other way, as if consciously giving her his back. As he moves out of view, it’s as though he’s dismissing her forever from this very specific world, where people drink two-hundred-year-old brandy, and men with money marry younger women.

She makes her way outside, across the quiet parking lot to the car. It’s cooler, and there’s a chilly breeze blowing out of the north. The moon is bright on the still bare branches of the trees. She leans against the car hood and tries to breathe, still fighting back tears. The door on her side is locked. She works her way around to his side, and that door is open.

There’s nothing moving anywhere in the sprawl of shadows and shrubs at the entrance to the restaurant.

She gets in behind the wheel of the car and pulls the door shut. All the sounds around her are her own: she puts both hands on the wheel and holds it tight, shivering, sniffling, watching the entrance. Nothing stirs. She thinks of Tillie, out in the world, somewhere under this very moon, living her interesting and glamorous life with all its happy choices and all the long friendships and associations, and then she wonders what Ted will say or do when he comes from the restaurant. Briefly, it’s as if she’s anticipating what punishment he might dole out. Realizing this, she slides over to her own side of the car, the passenger side, which is in a well of moonlight.

Certainly he’ll be able to see her shape in the car as soon as he steps out from the shadow of the building.

Hurriedly, almost frantically, she wipes her eyes with the palms of her hands, then takes a handkerchief out of her purse and begins trying to get the mascara off her cheeks. Her heart races; there’s a sharp stitch in her side. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and then she touches the handkerchief to her lips, puts it away, arranging herself, smoothing the folds of her dress over her knees, running her hands through her hair, trying to achieve a perfectly dignified demeanor—which, for the moment, is all she can do, sitting here alone, frightened, at the start of a change she hadn’t seen coming—assuming the look, she hopes, of someone who has been slighted, whose sensibilities have been wounded, and to whom an apology is due.

Shortly after her
marriage to Delbert Chase, the Kaufman’s daughter and only child broke off all contact with them. The newlyweds lived on the other side of town, on Delany Street, above some retired farmer’s garage, and Frank Kaufman, driving by in the mornings on his way to work at the real estate office, would see their new Ford parked out in front. It was a demo: Delbert had landed a job selling cars at Tom Nixx New & Used Cars.

Some days, the car was still there when Kaufman came back past on his way home for lunch.

“Lazy good-for-nothing,” he muttered, talking with his wife about it. “How can he get away with that? Nixx ought to have his head examined.”

“Is she any better?” his wife said. “Mrs. Mertock said she saw her at Rite Aid in overalls and a T-shirt, buying beer and cigarettes at nine o’clock in the morning. Nine o’clock in the morning.”

He shook his head. “Ungrateful little …” He didn’t finish the thought. He had spoken merely to punctuate his wife’s anger. “Well,” he went on, “I
wish her the best. It’s her life now, and if that’s the way she wants it, so be it. Maybe she’ll come back when she grows up a little.”

“This door is locked, if she does. That’s the way I feel about it. This door is locked.”

“Caroline—you don’t mean that.”

But her mouth was set in a straight, determined line.

He headed back to work after these discussions with a roiling stomach, and when he passed the little garage, if the new Ford was gone, he would think of stopping. But then the fact of her neglect, the memory of her heartless treatment of her mother, would go through him, a venom entering his blood.

They had opposed the marriage vigorously, it was true, having found it almost more than they could stand to watch the girl simply throw herself away in that misty-eyed fashion—quitting the university, discarding the opportunities they had labored so hard over the years to provide for her, in favor of someone like Delbert Chase.
Delbert Chase. Delbert Chase.
Kaufman kept saying the name, unable to believe any of it—this ex-sailor, who had a tattoo of an anchor and chain on his upper arm, and who had actually made several passing innuendos about having been with women in foreign ports, consorting with every sort of lowlife, as he had said, joking about it in that cavalier manner, as though his listeners would be impressed with the dissipated life he had led out in the world. And you could see how proud he was of it all even as he claimed to regret it.

His arrival in their lives had been a trouble that came upon the Kaufmans from the blind side. But they had made every effort, after the marriage was a fact, had tried to smooth things over and to get beyond all the fuss, as Caroline had said to the girl once, talking on the telephone—more than six weeks ago now.

“Why don’t you just call her?” Kaufman suggested one early afternoon. “Just say hello.”

“I was the last one to call,” Caroline told him. “Remember? She was positively rude. ‘I have to go, Mother.’” Kaufman’s wife drew her small mouth into a sour, downturning frown, mimicking her daughter’s voice. “And she hung up before I could even say goodbye.”

“What if I called her?” Kaufman said. “What if I just dialed the number
and asked to speak to her? I could do that, couldn’t I? Hello, Fay. Hello, darling—this is your old father. How’s married life?”

“You go right ahead. As far as I’m concerned, it’s up to her now.”

They went through the spring and into the hot weather this way. He hated what it was doing to his wife, and didn’t like what he felt in his own heart. Things were getting away from them both. Each passing day made them feel all the more at a loss, filled them with helpless frustration, a strange combination of petulance and sorrow. Yet when he tried to talk about it, Caroline’s mouth drew into that determined line.

“I showed concern for her welfare,” she said. “I gave a damn what happened to her. And that’s what I’m being punished for.”

He went back and forth to work, drove past the little garage with the new Ford parked out front. He thought about Delbert Chase being in there with her.

Every morning. Every afternoon.

In August, Mrs.
Mertock said she’d seen Fay at the Rite Aid again, and that there were large bruises on her arms. Mrs. Mertock had tried to engage her in conversation, but Fay only seemed anxious to be gone. “I took hold of her hand and she just slipped out of my grip, just went away from me as if I’d tried to take hold of smoke. I couldn’t get her to stand still, and then she was off. She seemed—well, like a scared deer.”

Kaufman listened to this, standing in his kitchen in the sounds of the summer night. He had been drinking a beer. Caroline and Mrs. Mertock were sitting at the table.

“He’s manhandling her?” Caroline said after a pause.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Mertock. “I just know what I saw.”

“I’m going over there,” Kaufman said.

“No, you are not,” said Caroline. “You’re not going over there making a fool of yourself. She’s made her bed, and if there’s something she’s unhappy about, let her come to us. For all we know she got the bruises some innocent way.”

“But what if she didn’t,” he said.

His wife straightened, and folded her hands on the table. “She knows where we live.”

Since Fay’s adolescence, he had been rather painfully conscious of himself as being only an interested bystander in the lives of the two women; they
possessed shared experience that he couldn’t know, and there had developed over the years a sort of tender distance between father and daughter, a tentativeness that he wished he could put behind him. Whenever he drove by the garage on Delany Street, he entertained fantasies of what he might say and what she might say, if he could bring himself to stop. If he could shake the feeling that she would simply close the door in his face.

One morning, perhaps a week after Mrs. Mertock’s revelations, Fay showed up at his work. He was sitting at his desk, in his glass-bordered cubicle, talking on the telephone to a client, when he saw her standing at the entrance. His heart jumped in his chest. He interrupted the man on the other end of the line—”I’ve got to go, I’ll call you back”—and without waiting for an answer, he hung the phone up and hurried out to her.

She stiffened as he approached, and he took hold of her elbow. “Hey, princess,” he said.

“Don’t.” She pulled away—seemed to wince. “I don’t want to be touched, okay?”

He looked for the bruises on her thin arms, but they were dark from time in the sun.

“Can we go somewhere?” she said.

They went out onto the landing at the entrance of the building. It was hot; the air blasted at them as they emerged. She pushed the silken dark hair back from her brow and looked at him a moment.

“Do I get a kiss?” he said.

This seemed to offend her. “Oh, please.”

He stood there unable to speak.

“I’m sure Mrs. Mertock’s talked to you,” she said. And then, as if to herself: “If I know Mrs. Mertock.”

“Fay, if there’s something you need—”

She looked off. “I feel spied on. I don’t like it. I can work things out for myself.”

“We worry about you,” he said. “Of course.”

“Okay, listen,” she told him. “It wasn’t anything. It was a little fight and it’s been apologized for. I can’t even go to the store without—”

“Princess—” he began.

But she was already walking away. “I don’t need your help. Tell that to Mother. I don’t want her help, or anyone’s help. I’m fine.”

“Sweetie,” he said, “can we call you?”

She had turned her back, going on down to the street and across it, looking one way and then the other, but not back at him. When she got to the corner, he shouted, “We’ll call you.”

But Caroline would
not make the call. “I’m not begging for the affection of my child,” she said. “And I won’t have you beg for it, either.”

“We wouldn’t be begging for it,” he said. “Would we? Is that what we would be doing?”

“I’ve said all I’m going to say on the subject. You were not on the phone the last time. You didn’t hear the tone she used with me.”

She was adamant, and would not be moved.

Even when, a few weeks later, he learned from a client whose wife worked as a nurse at Fauquier Hospital that Fay had been a patient one night in the emergency room, claiming that she had incurred injuries in a fall. Kaufman learned this when the client asked about Fay—was she feeling any better after her little mishap? A chill washed over him as the client spoke of accidents in the home, so many—the scary percentages of broken limbs and lacerations in the one place that was supposed to be safe from injury.

“Did she have broken bones?” Kaufman asked, before he could stop himself.

The client gave him a worried look. “I think it was just cuts and bruises.”

As soon as he could extricate himself from the client, he called Fay. “What?” she said, sounding sullen and half-awake. It was almost noon.

“Fay, is he hitting you? He’s hitting you, isn’t he?”

“Leave me alone.” The line clicked.

He drove to the police station. No one had anything to tell him. One policeman, a squat, lantern-jawed, middle-aged sergeant, seemed puzzled. “You want to report what?”

“Beatings. My daughter.”

“Where is she?”

“Home.”

“I’m sorry—your home?”

“No. Where she lives. Her husband beats her up. I want it stopped.”

“Did she send you here?”

“Look. She’s been beaten up. Her husband did it.”

“Did you see him do it?”

“He did it,” Kaufman said. “Jesus Christ.”

“I have to ask this,” the policeman said. “Does she want to press charges?”

“I’m
pressing charges, goddammit.”

“Calm down, Mr. Kaufman. Is your daughter going to press charges?”

“Look, I came here to press charges.”

“Let me get this straight here.
You
want to press charges?”

He spent most of the afternoon there, talking to one officer and then another. No help. The law was unfortunately clear. Virginia was not yet a state with provision for such cases as this: if Kaufman’s daughter would not press charges herself, then nothing at all could be done.

“I’m sorry about it,” the officer said. “Why don’t you talk to your daughter? See if you can get her to press charges?”