The Stories of Richard Bausch (30 page)

“Isn’t there a friend you’d like to go with—somebody with the money to go?”

“I thought
we’d
go.”

“Don’t you think I’d get in your way a little? A young man like you, in one of those touring groups with his mother?”

“I thought it might be a good thing,” he muttered.

She turned a little on the seat, to face him. “Don’t mope, Charles.”

“I’m not. I just thought it might be fun to travel together.”

“We travel everywhere together these days,” she said.

He stared ahead at the road.

“You know,” she said after a moment, “I think Aunt Lois was a little surprised that we took her up on her invitation.”

“Wouldn’t you like traveling together?” Charles said.

“I think you should go with somebody else if you go. I’m glad we’re taking
this
trip together. I really am. But for me to go on a long trip like that with you—well, it just seems, I don’t know, uncalled-for.”

“Why uncalled-for?” he asked.

“Let’s take one trip at a time,” she said.

“Yes, but why uncalled-for?”

“We’ll talk about it later.” This was her way of curtailing a discussion; she would say, very calmly, as if there were all the time in the world, “We’ll talk about it later,” and of course her intention was that the issue, whatever its present importance, would be forgotten, the subject would be closed. If it was broached again, she was likely to show impatience and, often, a kind of
“Yes, well, you wait. Wait till you’re my age. You’ll see.”

A little later, she said, “All the times you and your father and I have been down here, and I still feel like it’s been a thousand years.”

“It’s strange to be coming through when the trees are all bare,” said Charles. Aunt Lois had asked them to come. She didn’t want to be alone on Christmas, and she didn’t want to travel anymore; she had come north to visit every Christmas for fifteen years, and now that Lawrence was gone she didn’t feel there was any reason to put herself through the journey again, certainly not to sit in that house with Charles’s mother and pine for some other Christmas. She was going to stay put, and if people wanted to see her, they could come south. “Meaning us,” Charles’s mother said. And Aunt Lois said, “That’s exactly what I meant, Marie. I’m glad you’re still quick on the uptake.” They were talking on the telephone, but Aunt Lois’s voice was so clear and resonant that Charles, sitting across the room from his mother, could hear every word. His mother held the receiver an inch from her ear and looked at him and smiled. They’d go. Aunt Lois was not about to budge. “We do want to see her,” Charles’s mother said, “and I guess we don’t really want to be here for Christmas, do we?”

Charles shook his head no.

“I guess we don’t want Christmas to come at all,” she said into the phone. Charles heard Aunt Lois say that it was coming anyway, and nothing would stop it. When his mother had hung up, he said, “I don’t think I want to go through it anywhere,” meaning Christmas.

She said, “We could just stay here and not celebrate it or something. Or we could have a bunch of people over, like we did on Thanksgiving.”

“No,” Charles said, “let’s go.”

“I know one thing,” she said. “Your father wouldn’t want us moping around on his favorite holiday.”

“I’m not moping,” Charles said. “Good. Dad wouldn’t like it.”

It had been four months, and she had weathered her grief, had shown him how strong she was, yet sometimes such a bewildered look came into her eyes. He saw in it something of his own bewilderment: his father had been young and vigorous, his heart had been judged to be strong—and now life seemed so frail and precarious.

Driving south, Charles looked over at his mother and wondered how he
dismay, as if one had shown very bad manners calling up so much old-hat, so much ancient history.

“I’m not doing anything out of duty,” Charles said.

“Who said anything about duty?”

“I just wanted you to know.”

“What an odd thing to say.”

“Well, you said that about it being uncalled-for.”

“I just meant it’s not necessary, Charles. Besides, don’t you think it’s time for you to get on with the business of your own life?”

“I don’t see how traveling together is stopping me,” he said.

“All right, but I don’t want to talk about it now.”

“Okay, then.”

“Aren’t you going a little fast?”

He slowed down.

A few moments later, she said, “You’re driving. I guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“I
was
going too fast,” he said. “I’m kind of jumpy, too.”

They lapsed into silence. It had begun to rain a little, and Charles turned the windshield wipers on. Other cars, coming by them, threw a muddy spray up from the road.

“Of all things,” his mother said, “I really am nervous all of a sudden.”

Aunt Lois’s house
was a little three-bedroom rambler in a row of three-bedroom ramblers just off the interstate. At the end of her block was an overpass sixty feet high, which at the same time each clear winter afternoon blotted out the sun; a wide band of shade stretched across the lawn and the house, and the sidewalk often stayed frozen longer than the rest of the street. Aunt Lois kept a five-pound bag of rock salt in a child’s wagon on her small front porch, and in the evenings she would stand there and throw handfuls of it on the walk. Charles’s father would tease her about it, as he teased her about everything: her chain-smoking, her love of country music—which she denied vehemently—her fear of growing fat, and her various disasters with men, about which she was apt to hold forth at great length and with very sharp humor, with herself as the butt of the jokes, the bumbling central character.

She stood in the light of her doorway, arms folded tight, and called to them to be careful of ice patches on the walk. There was so much rock salt it crackled under their feet, and Charles thought of the gravel walk they had all traversed following his father’s body in the funeral procession, the last time he had seen Aunt Lois. He shivered as he looked at her there now, outlined in the light.

“I swear,” she was saying, “I can’t believe you actually decided to come.”

“Whoops,” Charles’s mother said, losing her balance slightly. She leaned on his arm as they came up onto the porch. Aunt Lois stood back from the door. Charles couldn’t shake the feeling of the long funeral walk, that procession in his mind. He held tight to his mother’s elbow as they stepped up through Aunt Lois’s door. Her living room was warm, and smelled of cake. There was a fire in the fireplace. The lounge chair his father always sat in was on the other side of the room. Aunt Lois had moved it. Charles saw that the imprint of its legs was still in the nap of the carpet. Aunt Lois was looking at him.

“Well,” she said, smiling and looking away. She had put pinecones and sprigs of pine along the mantel. On the sofa the Sunday papers lay scattered. “I was beginning to worry,” she said, closing the door. “It’s been such a nasty day for driving.” She took their coats and hung them in the closet by the front door. She was busying herself, bustling around the room. “Sometimes I think I’d rather drive in snow than rain like this.” Finally she looked at Charles. “Don’t I get a hug?”

He put his arms around her, felt the thinness of her shoulders. One of the things his father used to say to her was that she couldn’t get fat if it was required, and the word
required
had had some other significance for them both, for all the adults. Charles had never fully understood it; it had something to do with when they were all in school. He said “Aunt Lois, you couldn’t get fat if it was required.”

“Don’t,” she said, waving a hand in front of her face and blinking. “Lord, boy, you even sound like him.”

He said, “We had a smooth trip.” There wasn’t anything else he could think of. She had moved out of his arms and was embracing his mother. The two women stood there holding tight, and his mother sniffled.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” Aunt Lois said. “I feel like you’ve come home.”

Charles’s mother said, “What smells so good?” and wiped her eyes with the gloved backs of her hands.

“I made spice cake. Or I
tried
spice cake. I burned it, of course.”

“It smells good,” Charles said.

“It does,” said his mother.

Aunt Lois said, “I hope you like it
very
brown.” And then they were at a loss for something else to say. Charles looked at the empty lounge chair, and Aunt Lois turned and busied herself with the clutter of newspapers on the sofa. “I’ll just get this out of the way,” she said.

“I’ve got to get the suitcases out of the trunk,” Charles said.

They hadn’t heard him. Aunt Lois was stacking the newspapers, and his mother strolled about the room like a daydreaming tourist in a museum. He let himself out and walked to the car, feeling the cold, and the aches and stiffnesses of having driven all day. It was misting now, and a wind was blowing. Cars and trucks rumbled by on the overpass, their headlights fanning out into the fog. He stood and watched them go by, and quite suddenly he did not want to be here. In the house, in the warm light of the window, his mother and Aunt Lois moved, already arranging things, already settling themselves for what would be the pattern of the next few days; and Charles, fumbling with the car keys in the dark, feeling the mist on the back of his neck, had the disquieting sense that he had come to the wrong place. The other houses, shrouded in darkness, with only one winking blue light in the window of the farthest one, seemed alien and unfriendly somehow. “Aw, Dad,” he said under his breath.

As he got the trunk open, Aunt Lois came out and made her way to him, moving very slowly, her arms out for balance. She had put on an outlandish pair of floppy yellow boots, and her flannel bathrobe collar jutted above the collar of her raincoat. “Marie seems none the worse for wear,” she said to him. “How are you two getting along?”

“We had a smooth trip,” Charles said.

“I didn’t mean the trip.”

“We’re okay, Aunt Lois.”

“She says you want to go to Europe with her.”

“It didn’t take her long,” Charles said, “did it. I just suggested it in the car on the way here. It was just an idea.”

“Let me take one of those bags, honey. I don’t want her to think I came out here just to jabber with you, although that’s exactly why I did come out.”

Charles handed her his own small suitcase.

“You like my boots?” she said. “I figured I could attract a handsome fireman with them.” She modeled them for him, turning.

“They’re a little big for you, Aunt Lois.”

“You’re no fun.”

He was struggling with his mother’s suitcases.

“I guess you noticed that I moved the chair. You looked a little surprised. But when I got back here after the funeral I walked in there and—well, there it was, right where he always was whenever you all visited. I used to tease him about sleeping in it all day—you remember. We all used to tease him about it. Well, I didn’t want you to walk in and see it that way—”

Charles closed the trunk of the car and hefted the suitcases, facing her.

“You want to go home, don’t you,” she said.

It seemed to him that she had always had a way of reading him. “I want everything to be back the way it was,” he said. “I know,” Aunt Lois said.

He followed her back to the house. On the porch she turned and gave him a sad look and then forced a smile. “You’re an intelligent young man, and a very good one, too. So serious and sweet—a very dear, sweet boy.”

He might have mumbled a thank-you, he didn’t really know. He was embarrassed and confused and sick at heart; he had thought he wanted this visit. Aunt Lois kissed him on the cheek, then stood back and sighed. “I’m going to need your help about something. Boy, am I ever.”

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“It’s nothing. It’s just a situation.” She sighed again. She wasn’t looking at him now. “I don’t know why, but I find it—well, reassuring, somehow, that we—we—leave such a gaping hole in everything when we go.”

He just stood there, weighted down with the bags.

“Well,” she said, and opened the door for him.

Charles’s mother said
she wanted to sit up and talk, but she kept nodding off. Finally she was asleep. When Aunt Lois began gently to wake her, to
walk her in to her bed, Charles excused himself and made his way to his own bed. A few moments later he heard Aunt Lois in the kitchen. As had always been her custom, she would drink one last cup of coffee before retiring. He lay awake, hearing the soft tink of her cup against the saucer, and at last he began to drift. But in a little while he was fully awake again. Aunt Lois was moving through the house turning the lights off, and soon she too was down for the night. Charles stared through the shadows of the doorway to what he knew was the entrance to the living room, and listened to the house settle into itself. Outside, there were the hum and whoosh of traffic on the overpass, and the occasional sighing rush of rain at the window, like surf. Yet he knew he wouldn’t sleep. He was thinking of summer nights in a cottage on Cape Cod, when his family was happy, and he lay with the sun burning in his skin and listened to the adults talking and laughing out on the screened porch, the sound of the bay rushing like this rain at this window. He couldn’t sleep. Turning in the bed, he cupped his hands over his face.

A year ago, two years—at some time and in some way that was beyond him—his parents had grown quiet with each other, a change had started, and he could remember waking up one morning near the end of his last school year with a deep sense that something somewhere would go so wrong, was already so wrong that there would be no coming back from it. There was a change in the chemistry of the household that sapped his will, that took the breath out of him and left him in an exhaustion so profound that even the small energy necessary for speech seemed unavailable to him. This past summer, the first summer out of high school, he had done nothing with himself; he had found nothing he wanted to do, nothing he could feel anything at all about. He looked for a job because his parents insisted that he do so; it was an ordeal of walking, of managing to talk, to fill out applications, and in the end he found nothing. The summer wore on and his father grew angry and sullen with him. Charles was a disappointment and knew it; he was overweight, and seemed lazy, and he couldn’t find a way to explain himself. His mother thought there might be something physically wrong, and so then there were doctors, and medical examinations to endure. What he wanted was to stay in the house and have his parents be the people that they once were—happy, fortunate people with interest in each other and warmth and humor between them. And then one day in September his father keeled over on the sidewalk outside a restaurant in New York, and Charles had
begun to be this person he now was, someone hurting in this irremediable way, lying awake in his aunt’s house in the middle of a cold December night, wishing with all his heart it were some other time, some other place.